The Montage Mosaic Engine and Visualization

Those of you who have used Montage probably know it as a toolkit for processing images to create mosaics. It is, however, finding applicability in the visualization of images, as described in “The Application of Montage to the Visualization of Astronomical Images,” by Bruce Berriman and John Good. It is an Open Access paper published in a PASP Special Focus Edition on Visualization, edited by Brian Kent.

You can watch a video abstract of the paper here:

There are several areas where Montage brings value to visualization work, primarily because its design as a toolkit enables integration into software environments:

• Integration into visualization environments, usually asa reprojection engine to co-register and re-project multi-wavelength images to a common set of image parameters, and represent them in a common coordinate system. Examples are JS9 and APLPy. Luciani et al 2014  integrated Montage into a highly-scalable client-server architecture intended as a demonstration of how a visualization environment would operate when extended to petascale processing.
• Creation of cutouts of large images and down-sampled versions of large images that can then be visualized on desktops or in browsers.
• Rectification of the sky background to a common level to reveal faint, diffuse features in large-scale images.
• Creation of PNG representations of FITS images by mViewer, which allows full-color (three-image) displays of images with optional color enhancement, and integration with Python. mViewer can be used to create complex images in bulk. It can with a single command create 
complex images such as this one