The Montage Image Mosaic Engine was designed as a scalable toolkit, written
in C for performance and portability across *nix platforms, that assembles FITS
images into mosaics. The code is freely available and has been widely used in
the astronomy and IT communities for research, product generation and for
developing next-generation cyber-infrastructure. Recently, it has begun to
finding applicability in the field of visualization. This has come about
because the toolkit design allows easy integration into scalable systems that
process data for subsequent visualization in a browser or client. And it
includes a visualization tool suitable for automation and for integration into
Python: mViewer creates, with a single command, complex multi-color images
overlaid with coordinate displays, labels, and observation footprints, and
includes an adaptive image histogram equalization method that preserves the
structure of a stretched image over its dynamic range. The Montage toolkit
contains functionality originally developed to support the creation and
management of mosaics but which also offers value to visualization: a
background rectification algorithm that reveals the faint structure in an
image; and tools for creating cutout and down-sampled versions of large images.
Version 5 of Montage offers support for visualizing data written in HEALPix
sky-tessellation scheme, and functionality for processing and organizing images
to comply with the TOAST sky-tessellation scheme required for consumption by
the World Wide Telescope (WWT). Four online tutorials enable readers to
reproduce and extend all the visualizations presented in this paper.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures; accepted for publication in the PASP Special
Focus Issue: Techniques and Methods for Astrophysical Data Visualizatio
