Montage and Radio Astronomy

TL;DR

Montage, an open-source image mosaic engine, has been widely adopted across the electromagnetic spectrum, especially in radio astronomy, for data processing, visualization, and analysis of phenomena like fast radio bursts.

Contribution

This paper highlights the growing use of Montage in radio astronomy and discusses three high-profile applications demonstrating its versatility and effectiveness.

Findings

Montage supports analysis of SKA precursor data.

It enables Faraday tomography of LoTSS-DR2 data.

It assists in identifying fast radio bursts.

Abstract

The Montage Image Mosaic Engine, first released in 2002, has found applicability across the electromagnetic spectrum to support data processing and visualization. This broad applicability has come about through its design as an Open Source ANSI-C toolkit (and Python binary extensions), with independent components to perform each step in the creation of a mosaic and with support for all WCS extensions. This design enables easy integration into custom environments, workflows and pipelines, and is the principal reason for its long lifetime. Here we emphasize the growing use of Montage in radio astronomy (37 peer-reviewed papers since 2020), and will focus on three high-profile applications: (1) Analysis of observations made with SKA precursor experiments, such as MeerKAT and the Murchison Wide-field Array, (2) Faraday tomography of LOFAR Two-Metre Sky Survey data (LoTSS-DR2), which explores the structure of the local interstellar medium, and (3) Identification of fast radio bursts.