My wife was working with teachers on a lesson plan involving having students look at Tree Cores.

The original challenge was to find a way to print out images of the cores so that students could inspect them, but getting a high enough pixel resolution in a form factor teachers could easily print and manage was a real challenge.

The tree core images themselves were huge, so even just managing the files on the computer was proving to be a challenge, and would have been even more so on an underpowered student machine.

So, I did a little research and found out about Deep Zoom Images. Using the OpenSeadragon library, I was able to make a snazzy little interface to allow students to easily browser the tree core images.