Collaborative Astronomical Image Mosaics

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and application of Montage, a tool for creating astronomical image mosaics, highlighting its integration with Virtual Observatory standards and various parallel processing methods to enhance large-scale data analysis.

Contribution

It introduces Montage as a versatile, distributed image mosaicking tool compatible with multiple parallel computing environments and web services, facilitating large-scale astronomical data analysis.

Findings

Montage supports various parallel processing modes including MPI, grid, and scripted approaches.

A web-based Montage service is available for easy access and use.

The chapter explores Web 2.0 technologies to improve Montage community collaboration.

Abstract

This chapter describes how astronomical imaging survey data have become a vital part of modern astronomy, how these data are archived and then served to the astronomical community through on-line data access portals. The Virtual Observatory, now under development, aims to make all these data accessible through a uniform set of interfaces. This chapter also describes the scientific need for one common image processing task, that of composing individual images into large scale mosaics and introduces Montage as a tool for this task. Montage, as distributed, can be used in four ways: as a single thread/process on a single CPU, in parallel using MPI to distribute similar tasks across a parallel computer, in parallel using grid tools (Pegasus/DAGMan) to distributed tasks across a grid, or in parallel using a script-driven approach (Swift). An on-request web based Montage service is available for users who do not need to build a local version. We also introduce some work on a new scripted version of Montage, which offers ease of customization for users. Then, we discuss various ideas where Web 2.0 technologies can help the Montage community.