PyCon US
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2021–2024
41:07 · 24K views · Jun 2, 2021
Robert Erdmann, a materials scientist at the Rijksmuseum, gives a PyCon keynote on the ultra-high-resolution imaging of Rembrandt's Night Watch. He covers the automated gantry camera system, the Python software that drives it, and the large volumes of image data involved.
HN commenters recommend it as a technically jaw-dropping talk, and it is the standard reference whenever the Night Watch gigapixel images come up.
7 comments from Hacker News
Robert Erdmann's keynote at PyCon: this video The talk centers around Erdmann's use of python in "combining materials science, computer science, and imaging science to help the world access, preserve, and understand its cultural heritage". The technical complexity and nuance that went into the project was truly jaw-dropping. This was the first talk I immediately felt the urge to share with multiple co-workers & friends.
I can’t hear about the Rijksmuseum without thinking of the presentation Rob Erdmann did at Pycon on how they imaged Rembrandt’s Night Watch: this video Incredible work being done there. I’m glad to see they’re continuing to make headlines.
Robert Erdmann also gave a keynote talk at PyCon US 2021 about how they used Python for most of digitization and processing of the Night Watch (aka Operation Night Watch). Fascinating talk with tones of technical details. Link: this video
For anyone interested in technical aspects of this, I recommend watching Pycon talk [1] from Robert Erdmann. I bookmarked this couple of years ago. [1] this video
Glad to see this getting exposure on HN. I gave a PyCon keynote [1] last year about how this was done. I've also put the image online in my own viewer [2], which has a few additional features: it encodes the viewing location in the URL and it allows for multi-pane synchronized views [3]. (Please be nice to my server.) I'm happy to answer questions here or on Twitter (@erdmann). [1] this video [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]