What is Montage?
Montage is a toolkit for assembling Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) images into custom mosaics. Key features for end users are:
- 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; co-adding images
- Convenience:
- Tools for managing and manipulating large image files
News
- January 19, 2011
- Montage now has a published Wikipedia article.
- December 15, 2010
- Montage version 3.3 released! Plus, new C-shell scripts contributed by Colin Aspin and new publications on using Montage in cloud computing and Web 2.0. Also, read the new Montage blog and "Like" us on Facebook.
- July 1, 2010
- Our new User-Contributed Software page now contains a link to Dr. Tom Robitaille's Python API for Montage. The software enhances Montage functionality, including functions for accessing individual Montage commands and facilitating mosaicking and re-projecting.
- March 22, 2010
- The on-request mosaic Web service now serves the DR7 data set from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).
- October 4, 2007
- IRSA and the NVO announce an on-request mosaic Web service. The service runs on a compute cluster and uses Montage to return mosaics from 2MASS, SDSS and DSS.
Getting Started
Get The Software:
- Download the Montage toolkit
- Contribute your own software that works with Montage
Learn to Use Montage:
- Sample script: A mosaic made with images of the Pleiades
- Tutorial: Build an m101 mosaic
- Overview of Montage Modules for creating mosaics, and analyzing and processing FITS files
Learn How Montage Is Used In:
Featured Mosaic
This 2MASS image of a star formation region near the Pelican Nebula in Cygnus was created with C-shell scripts contributed by Montage user. Get the scripts and learn how to re-create this image on the User-Contributed Software page. Image credit: Colin Aspin (University of Hawaii)
