Obscenely detailed scan lets you peer at Rembrandt’s Night Watch masterpiece online

The image is called "Operation NightWatch_Rijksmuseum."

The level of detail is amazing.

The image is from the Rijksmuseum.

The largest and most detailed photograph of any artwork can be seen for free on the website of the Rijks museum. The Night Watch is a 12 by 14 foot painting by Rembrandt van Rijn and is the focus of a massive research and restoration project called "Operation Night Watch."

The technical details of the scans are very detailed. In a press release, the Rijksmuseum explains that it is made up of 8,439 individual photographs taken with a 100 megapixel Hasselblad H6D 400MS camera. Neural networks were used to check the images for sharpness and color, and an artificial intelligence system was used to stitch the images together.

A 717 gigapixel image that is 5.6 terabytes in size shows an area just 5 micrometers in size on the original painting. The museum notes that it is four times sharper than the last one they put out, which was only 44.8 gigapixels big, and where each pixel represented a relatively small 20 micrometers.

:noupscale is a file on the website of thevox-cdn.com.

Enhance.

The image is from the Rijksmuseum.

You can see the cracks in the individual brush strokes of this masterpiece thanks to the impact. This software allows you to really press your nose up against the painting in a way that would get you thrown out of most museums, so it is an even better experience than seeing the painting in the flesh.

The website has an alternative version of The Night Watch that has the missing sides restored. In 1715, the sections were stripped from the painting and put in a more cramped location in Amsterdam. The missing segments were restored last year based on a 17th-century copy of the original painting. This work was done as part of the same project.

According to the press release, the scans will help with research of the painting. Researchers should be able to track how the painting ages with more accuracy. The Night Watch will be mounted onto a new stretcher to correct the deformities in the canvas that have appeared, and the museum will consider other preservation treatments.

There is a high resolution version of The Night Watch here. If you want to look at more high-resolution scans of classic works of art, check out this 10 gigapixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.