Montage Version 3.0

NASA Tech Briefs, Mar 2006 by Jacob, Joseph, Katz, Daniel, Prince, Thomas, Berriman, Graham, Et al

The final version (3.0) of the Montage software has been released. To recapitulate from previous NASA Tech Briefs articles about Montage: This software generates custom, science-grade mosaics of astronomical images on demand from input files that comply with the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) standard and contain image data registered on projections that comply with the World Coordinate System (WCS) standards. This software can be executed on singleprocessor computers, multi-processor computers, and such networks of geographically dispersed computers as the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid or NASA's Information Power Grid. The primary advantage of running Montage in a grid environment is that computations can be done on a remote supercomputer for efficiency. Multiple computers at different sites can be used for different parts of a computation - a significant advantage in cases of computations for large mosaics that demand more processor time than is available at any one site. Version 3.0 incorporates several improvements over prior versions. The most significant improvement is that this version is accessible to scientists located anywhere, through operational Web services that provide access to data from several large astronomical surveys and construct mosaics on either local workstations or remote computational grids as needed.

This program was written by Joseph Jacob, Daniel Katz, Thomas Prince, Graham Berriman, John Good, and Anastasia Laity of Caltech for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For further information, access the Technical Support Package (TSP) free online at www.techbriefs.com/tsp under the Software category.

This software is available for commercial licensing. Please contact Karina Edmonds of the California Institute of Technology at (818) 393-2827. Refer to NPO-41962.