The Montage Image Mosaic Service: Custom Image Mosaics On-Demand

Abstract

The Montage software suite has proven extremely useful as a general engine for reprojecting, background matching, and mosaicking astronomical image data from a wide variety of sources. The processing algorithms support all common World Coordinate System (WCS) projections and have been shown to be both astrometrically accurate and flux conserving. The background 'matching' algorithm does not remove background flux but rather finds the best compromise background based on all the input and matches the individual images to that. The Infrared Science Archive (IRSA), part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at Caltech, has now wrapped the Montage software as a CGI service and provided a compute and request management infrastructure capable of producing approximately 2 TBytes / day of image mosaic output (e.g. from 2MASS and SDSS data). Besides the basic Montage engine, this service makes use of a 16-node LINUX cluster (dual processor, dual core) and the ROME request management software developed by the National Virtual Observatory (NVO). ROME uses EJB/database technology to manage user requests, queue processing and load balance between users, and managing job monitoring and user notification. The Montage service will be extended to process userdefined data collections, including private data uploads.

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