Untitled CSSI Element: Elements: Bringing Montage To Cutting-Edge Science Environments

We describe the use of Montage to create all-sky astronomy maps compliant with the Hierarchical Progressive Survey (HiPS) sky-tesselation scheme. These maps support panning and zooming across the sky to progressively smaller scales, and are used widely for visualization in astronomy. They are, however, difficult to create at infrared wavelengths because of high background emission. Montage is an ideal tool for creating infrared maps for two reasons: it uses background modeling to rectify the time variable image backgrounds to a common level; and it uses an adaptive image stretch algorithm to convert the image data to display values for visualization. The creation of the maps involves the use of existing Montage tools in tandem with four new tools to support HiPS. We wil present images of infrared sky surveys in the HiPS scheme.