Montage: An Astronomical Image Mosaic Service for the NVO

Abstract

Montage is a software system for generating astronomical image mosaics according to user-specified size, rotation, WCS-compliant projection and coordinate system, with background modeling and rectification capabilities. Its architecture has been described in the proceedings of ADASS XII and XIII (Berriman et al. 2003, 2004). It has been designed as a toolkit, with independent modules for image reprojection, background rectification and co-addition, and will run on workstations, clusters and grids. The primary limitation of Montage thus far has been in the projection algorithm. It uses a spherical trigonometry approach that is general at the expense of speed. The reprojection algorithm has now been made 30 times faster for commonly used tangent plane to tangent plane reprojections that cover up to several square degrees, through modification of a custom algorithm first derived for the Spitzer Space Telescope. This focus session will describe this algorithm, demonstrate the generation of mosaics in real time, and describe applications of the software. In particular, we will highlight one case study which shows how Montage is supporting the generation of science-grade mosaics of images measured with the Infrared Array Camera aboard the Spitzer Space Telescope.

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