22 October 2015

Montage Image Mosaic Toolkit: New Release, New Features

Richard Fienberg

Richard Fienberg AAS Solar Eclipse Task Force

This announcement is posted on behalf of Marcy Harbut of Caltech's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center:

Montage is a toolkit for assembling Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) images into custom mosaics. Key features:

  • Accuracy: Preserves spatial and calibration fidelity of input images
  • Portability: Runs on all common Linux/Unix platforms
  • Scalability: Runs on desktops, clusters, and computational grids
  • Availability: Open-source code and user documentation available for download
  • Generality: Supports all World Coordinate System (WCS) projections and common coordinate systems
  • Performance: Processes 40 million pixels in up to 32 minutes on 128 nodes on a Linux cluster
  • Flexibility: Independent engines for analyzing the geometry of images on the sky, re-projecting images, rectifying background emission to a common level, and co-adding images
  • Convenience: Tools for managing and manipulating large image files.

Version 4.0 of the Montage Image Mosaic Toolkit has been released with a BSD 3-clause license. This is major new release that contains new modules to support the processing of data cubes; it also includes a command-line visualization tool.

The version 4.0 distribution is available from GitHub and from the Montage website, which also has more detailed information about the new release.