Building Montage

  1. Download the source code for Montage, and save it in the directory of your choice; we will refer to this containing directory as $INSTALL.

  2. Unzip the file. For example, if you downloaded Montage_vX.Y.tar.gz, type:

    gunzip Montage_vX.Y.tar.gz

    This will uncompress the file Montage_vX.Y.tar.

  3. Un-tar the file:

    tar xpf Montage_vX.Y.tar

    This will create the directory Montage_vX.Y, which will include the Montage files and subdirectories.

    Click here to see a packing list of the contents of the directories.

    See the Before Building section in Overview of Components for additional information.

  4. cd into the main Montage directory (Montage_vX.Y) and type "make" to build Montage. This will build all the libraries and executables (described in Montage Components), and place all the executables in $INSTALL/Montage_vX.Y/bin. Nothing outside the Montage directory will be altered. The build may take up to several minutes. There should be a continuous stream of output messages during this process.

  5. If you want to be able to run the Montage executables from any directory, you will need to add $INSTALL/Montage_vX.Y/bin to your path.

    For instance, using the bash shell on Linux, after installing Montage in /home/username/Montage_vX.Y, we add the following line to /home/username/.bash-profile:

    PATH=$PATH:$HOME/Montage_vX.Y/bin

    If you are using csh, you would add the following line to /home/username/.cshrc:

    set path = ($path /home/username/Montage_vX.Y/bin)

 

Libraries:

Montage relies on several astronomical libraries, all of which are included in the package and installed when Montage is built (under lib):

boundaries
Given a set of points on the sky, boundaries can determine the best-fit polygon containing them.
cfitsio
A library of routines for reading and writing data files in the FITS data format, written by William D Pence at HEASARC.
coord
Coordinate handling routines to transform coordinates between systems and epochs.
jpeg
JPEG image library
mtbl
Routines for extracting information from ASCII tables.
pixbounds
Boundaries around sets of points in the x-y plane
svc
Montage executables all produce structured responses as output (of the form [struct stat=status, ... additional information]). The svc library contains routines to start up processes, send commands, and parse the responses to extract keyword = value pairs or the value of a particular keyword.
two_plane
Plane-to-plane transformations in the tangent plane
wcstools
Subroutines for setting and using the world coordinate systems (WCS) in the headers of FITS images. Part of SAO's WCS Tools (http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/software/wcstools/)

 

Updating External Libraries:

If you would like to install a new version of the WCS or CFITSIO libraries under Montage, please read the external library notes in "Montage Components."