Third Party Validation by SWIRE Team
The SWIRE team have validated the Montage code by generating mosaics of synthetic IRAC images, and extracting sources using Sextractor. The figure below shows the difference between the fluxes in the original images and those measured by Montage.
Contact Montage for further details. The results presented below have been kindly made available by Dr. Carol Lonsdale.
Figure 1. The left axis shows the deviation between measured flux and the known input model flux, as a function of the model flux. The curve is not entirely along zero because it reflects well-known sources of bias in measuring astronomical fluxes, and in this sense the output is exactly as expected.
Figure 2. Known locations of bright input model sources (green) overlaid on a MONTAGE generated output mosaic. This is an easy confirmation of astrometric accuracy - more detailed analysis shows that individual sources have their expected positions to within the accuracy that they can be measured.
