Extending Montage to Larger or Different Problems

The algorithms employed by Montage do not themselves limit the size of either the input images or output mosaics. The main limiting factor to the problem size on which Montage can be applied is a hardware limitation of the amount of disk space available (see Montage Memory Requirements). If problems occur due to the size of the output image, we recommend that instead of constructing a single huge output mosaic, users should build a set of output mosaic tiles of more modest size that can simply be abutted together to form the desired image region. Users may prefer to leave the output as this set of tiles because they may encounter more problems anyway if they try to use their favorite FITS viewer to view the huge output mosaic.

Montage uses the WCS library for reprojection and uses a general mosaicking algorithm that should be suitable for creating mosaics in any WCS projection, as long as the input images have valid FITS headers with full WCS information.