Please note the new URL: http://astrofrog.github.com/python-montage/

Python-montage is a pure python module that provides a python API to the Montage Astronomical Image Mosaic Engine, including both functions to access individual Montage commands, and high-level functions to facilitate mosaicking and reprojecting.

Download the latest stable version
(0.9.3, released 10th December 2010)
To report bugs and request features, please use the issue tracker. To contact me directly, please use thomas dot robitaille [at] gmail dot com.

To follow the development and get a copy of the latest development code, visit the GitHub pages.


To install, simply run python setup.py install inside the python-montage-x.x.x directory. Alternatively, python-montage can be installed using easy_install python-montage if you have setuptools installed.

The only dependency for python-montage is the Montage software itself. Additionally, if the pyfits module is installed, a reproject_hdu function will be available. Finally, MPI is required in order to use the MPI-enabled Montage commands. Note that the Montage MPI-enabled commands are not installed by default.


The python-montage module is imported using import montage. All Montage commands (except mCoverageCheck, mJPEG, mMakeImg, and mTileImage) are implemented. For example, to access mProject, use montage.mProject, and for usage instructions, use help(montage.mProject). In addition, the following high-level functions are available:

• montage.reproject: reproject a FITS file
• montage.reproject_hdu: reproject a pyfits HDU image object
• montage.mosaic: mosaic all FITS files in a directory

For details on how to use these, use the help command.

A few Montage commands can be run using MPI for parallelization (see here). For MPI-enabled commands (such as mProjExec), the use of MPI is controlled via the mpi= argument. For example, to call mProjExec using MPI, call montage.mProjExec(..., mpi=True) (rather than montage.mProjExecMPI).


The following example illustrates how python-montage can be used to call basic Montage commands as well as how to retrieve and access the status object.