Montage and Radio Astronomy

The Montage Image Mosaic Engine, first released in 2002, was developed for processing FITS images from wide-field surveys at visible and infrared wavelengths. It has since found applicability across the electromagnetic spectrum to support data processing and visualization, from gamma-ray astronomy to low frequency radio astronomy. 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 (36 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) Identification of fast-radio bursts;(3) Faraday tomography of LOFAR Two-Metre Sky Survey data (LoTSS-DR2), which explores the structure of the local interstellar medium.