Abstracts
Building Image Mosaics With The Montage Mosaic Engine -- Bruce Berriman, John Good
Montage is a toolkit for aggregating astronomical images in FITS format into mosaics. Its scientific value derives from three features of its design:
- It uses algorithms that preserve the calibration and positional (astrometric) fidelity of the input images to deliver mosaics that meet user-specified parameters of projection, coordinates, and spatial scale. It supports all projections and coordinate systems in use in astronomy.
- •It contains independent modules for analyzing the geometry of images on the sky, and for creating and managing mosaics; these modules are powerful tools in their own right and have applicability outside mosaic production, in areas such as data validation.
- •It is written in American National Standards Institute (ANSI)-compliant C, and is portable and scaleable – the same engine runs on desktop, cluster or supercomputer environments running common Unix-based operating systems.
The code is open source, and has been downloaded over 2,500 times. Montage is in active use in generating science data products as part of pipeline processing, in underpinning quality assurance and validation of data, in analyzing scientific data and in creating Education and Public Outreach products. It is also used in the Grid community in the development of scheduling and workflow technologies, evaluating the cost benefits of cloud technology and evaluating provenance management methodologies. The presentation describes the design of Montage and selected applications in the areas described above.
Visit Montage at http://montage.ipac.caltech.edu.
Montage is a collaboration between the JPL Parallel Technologies Group, the Center for Advanced Computing Research at Caltech, the Information Sciences Institute at USC and IPAC.
AWAIC: A WISE Astronomical Image Co-adder
Frank Masci
One of the products from the WISE mission is a digital Image Atlas that combines the multiple survey exposures over the sky. To support this, we have developed a new co-addition tool, AWAIC, for execution in the automated pipeline. Here we describe AWAIC's algorithms, functionality, and products. The software includes preparatory steps such as frame background matching and outlier detection. Co-addition is based on using the detector's Point Response Function (PRF) as an interpolation kernel This kernel reduces the impact of prior-masked pixels; enables the creation of an optimal matched filtered product for point source detection; and most important, it allows for resolution enhancement to yield a "model" of the sky that is consistent with the observations to within measurement error. AWAIC is generic enough to be used on any astronomical image data that conforms to the FITS and WCS standards.
The Planck Early Release Compact Source Catalog: The first all-sky submm survey -- Bill Reach
Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with a primary objective of measuring the polarization of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Its nine frequency bands span a wide range from 30 to 857 GHz (corresponding to wavelengths from 1 cm to 350 microns), and its sensitive detectors make it a valuable astronomical all-sky survey. The highest-frequency detectors on Planck overlap with the longest wavelength detectors on Herschel. These facts combine to give rise to the Early Release Compact Source Catalog. This catalog will be generated at IPAC (with its heritage of generating reliable and timely data products from space missions) using the first sky coverage by Planck. Time is of the essence for this product, because we expect to discover new sources with Planck, and then to characterize them using the higher resolution and spectroscopic capabilities of Herschel before the latter runs out of cryogen