Dubai started off 2014 with quite a bang: The city's New Year's Eve fireworks display broke the Guinness World Record for largest pyrotechnics show on New Year's Eve.
During the six-minute show, more than 500,000 fireworks exploded, spanning 62 miles of Dubai's seafront and ending with a grandiose "artificial sunset." The entire spectacle was controlled by a network of 100 computers, took 10 months to plan and cost a cool $6 million.
See also: See New Year's Eve Through Google Glass in Times Square
Image: Gizmodo
The entire show was live streamed on YouTube; it begins at the 29-minute mark in the video above. The event shattered the previous record, held by Kuwait, in which 77,282 fireworks were set off in 2012. The new record joins several other superlatives that Dubai holds, including the world's tallest building, Burj Khalifa, and the world's largest manmade island, Palm Jumeirah.

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These triangles vary in size and range in length from 4.75 to 5.75 inches.
They let the ball shine in 16 million colors and billions of patterns.
The first was crafted from wood and iron, weighed 700 pounds and was covered in 100 light bulbs. In 1999, 92 years after the first ball drop, the Waterford Crystal version was built to ring in the new millennium. In 2007, modern LED technology replaced the older bulbs to celebrate the ceremony's 100 year anniversary, and in 2008 the permanent NYE ball was revealed atop One Times Square.
The first "time-ball" was built atop England's Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England in 1833. Ship captains would watch the ball would at 1 p.m. every day and set their chronometers (a navigational tool) accordingly.
In addition to the annual NYE Ball drop, the tradition lives on in places like the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, where a ball drops every day at noon.
Image: Karim Sahib/AFP/Getty Images