Collaborative Astronomical Image Mosaics

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 ve...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Daniel S. Katz, G. Bruce Berriman, Robert G. Mann
• Keywords: CORR 2010, Data Access Portals, Education, Image Processing Task, Large Scale Mosaics