RC3 mosaicking pipeline: Creating mosaics for the RC3 Catalogue

The RC3 mosaicking pipeline creates color composite images and scientifically-calibrated FITS mosaics in all SDSS imaging bands for all the RC3 galaxies that lie within the survey's footprint and on photographic plates taken by the Digitized Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (DPOSS) for the B, R, IR bands. The pipeline uses SExtractor (ascl:1010.064) for extraction and STIFF (ascl:1110.006) to generating color images. The mosaicking program uses a recursive algorithm for positional update first to correct the positional inaccuracy inherent in the RC3 catalog, then conducts the mosaicking procedure using the Astropy (ascl:1304.002) wrapper to IPAC's Montage (ascl:1010.036) software. The program is generalized into a pipeline that can be easily extended to future survey data or other source catalogs; an online interface is available at

http://lcdm.astro.illinois.edu/data/rc3/search.html.