Montage: a grid portal and software toolkit for science-grade astronomical image mosaicking

Abstract

Montage is a portable software toolkit to construct custom, science-grade mosaics that preserve the astrometry and photometry of astronomical sources. The user specifies the dataset, wavelength, sky location, mosaic size, coordinate system, projection, and spatial sampling. Montage supports massive astronomical datasets that may be stored in distributed archives. Montage can be run on both single- and multi-processor computers, including clusters and grids. Standard grid tools are used to access remote data or run Montage on remote computers. This paper describes the architecture, algorithms, performance, and usage of Montage as both a software toolkit and a grid portal.