07 April 2022 Due to hardware failures, we had to rebuild the Montage site on a new VM. Getting that VM set up and all the service software built took a little over a week, so we apologize to anyone who was impacted. With the Montage software itself served via GitHub, hopefully that was kept to a minimum. We had let the site cruise along for several years, so it is possible the OS changes are affecting things in subtle ways; please let us know if you detect anything that seems different.
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
- March 28, 2021
- The on-demand image mosaic is being decommissioned because the hardware is aging. We are replacing this service with Python notebooks that will, when complete, replicate and extend the functions available in the on-line service. The notebooks are freely available at https://github.com/Caltech-IPAC/MontageMosaics. We will be adding notebooks to the collection througout 2021.
- November 9, 2018
- Version 6 released. See Release of Montage Version 6.0 (MontagePy) on the home page or go directly to the User Guide for Running Montage Under Python.
- January 11, 2017
- Check out our poster "TOASTing Your Images with the Montage Mosaic Engine" by Bruce Berriman that was presented at the Winter AAS meeting in Grapevine, Texas this month. The poster describes how Montage transforms FITS files to the TOAST projection for consumption by the WorldWide Telescope.
- December 21, 2016
- Version 5 released. See Release of Montage Version 5.0 on the home page or the Download page.
- August 16, 2016
- We've posted a new tutorial for Montage novices called Getting Started: Creating Your First Mosaic.
- November 16, 2015
- We have released our YouTube channel that has four videos of image cubes created with Montage, including the GALFA movie shown at the ADASS conference in Sydney in October. Also, Montage is now on Twitter as @montage_mosaics.
- September 30, 2015
- Version 4 Released. See Release of Montage Version 4.0 on the home page.
- February 18, 2015
- Mac users should see the note on the left regarding patching the software.
- July 23, 2014
- The Montage license has been changed to a BSD 3-Clause License, which permits unlimited redistribution of Montage code for any purpose as long as its copyright notices and the license's disclaimers of warranty are included.
- 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.
Release of Montage Version 6.0
Version 6.0 is a major new release, and deploys Python binary extensions of existing Montage modules (MontagePy). Requires Python 3.x or above; Python 3.6+ is recommended. Montage is released with a BSD 3-clause license. Visit the Montage Python User Guide to learn more details of the release, how to install it, and how to use it.
What is in this release?
Python binary extensions of existing Montage modules; no new functionality has been introduced. Click here to see a list of all supported modules. The Python extensions have been created by transforming the C code into a library, with driver code fully separated to reproduce the calling sequence of the command-line tools; and then adding Python and C linkage code with the Cython library, which acts as a bridge between general C libraries and the Python interface. These binary extensions offer image processing at compiled speeds in the Python environment.
Featured Mosaic
The Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) has released a Jupyter notebook to retrieve cutouts from a wide area mosaic of TESS images created with Montage. The data may be accessed from https://archive.stsci.edu/hlsp/tess-coadd-cutouts and are described in Berriman, Good and Holwerda 2021. RNAAS, 5, 157.
Mosaic in galactic coordinates presented in an Aitoff projection derived from co-adds of TESS FFIs from sectors 1 through 21 that had been publicly released in 2020 April. The figure includes cutouts of four galaxies: N891 (bottom left; 1° square), M31 (bottom far right; 2.3° square), N5907 (upper-left center; 1° square), M101 (upper-right center; 1° square). The sets of three vertical stripes in the cutouts are associated with the strapping in the CCDs.
