Queen's legendary guitarist Brian May has revealed he has left a "gift to the nation" as he opened up about his own mortality. The 77-year-old star made the admission as he celebrated International Stereoscopy Day on June 21. The musician and astrophysicist took to Instagram to share that he has incorporated BMAS - the Brian May Archive of Stereoscopy - as a charity and confessed they will be responsible for maintaining his stereoscopy legacy following his death.

Alongside a video explaining what the day is all about, he wrote a lengthy caption in which he included the news. "The Brian May archive of Stereoscopy is now an incorporated charity, which now owns much of my stereoscopic image collection - and when I pass on to the next place, it will own all of it. My hope in creating this archive is that it will be able to sustain itself after I've gone, keeping intact the greatest (and only!) archive of stereoscopic photography in Britain. It will be a gift to the Nation," he penned.

Invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone, stereoscopy was hugely popular in the Victorian era. In stereoscopy, two flat images are put together in a special viewer to produce a scene in 3D.

Brian has been a long-time fan of the photographic style. His interest was first piqued when, at the age of 12, he found a stereoscopic card featuring a pair of hippos in a box of Weetabix.

He began his collection in earnest while studying Astronomy at Imperial College in the late 1960s.

He would scour Christie's photographic auctions, which at the time often had lots containing stereo views from the 1850s onwards, which were turning up in people's attics.

In 2008, he took his passion one step further when he recreated The London Stereoscopic Company, to bring the magic of true stereoscopy to the modern world even designing his own OWL stereoscope to view the images.

In 2017 he merged his day job with his passion for the art from and released Queen in 3D featuring stereoscopic images of the band which Brian had taken throughout their career.

In total he has has authored or co-authored eight books of stereo photographs through his London Stereoscopic Company.

Explaining the appeal to people he said in his post: "Once you've been bitten by 3-D images you will never want to go back to flat pictures!"