>>P.S. I'm working on a sample of astromonical images, which I think you would find very interesting. I hope you warm up to this in time for Christmas!
>
>What is that about - getting a collection, or generating the images, perhaps?

Hilmar,

Aside from being a launcher, Montage is a visual organizer for shortcuts. The idea is to create a sample montage that demonstrates the latter aspect, applied to the problem of creating and maintaining a reference of astronomical information, especially cool space images. One could imagine a separate "product" derived from this sample, which might be classified as "edu-tainment".

I'm just finishing up some program extensions aimed at dealing better with this sort of problem, where a background graphic becomes the basis for arranging shortcuts within a montage. For example, imagine starting from a broad field of stars, encompassing multiple constellations. From there one would be able to drill down on selected sub-regions and individual objects, possibly opening another montage, a web page, or a terminal image, depending on how the data has been populated. Only a small subset of the images would actually reside on the local machine, with most being directly accessed across the web.

There are so many fantasic space images freely available on the web, but I always find myself wondering "where the hell is that thing?". I hope this application will help in gathering, assimilating, and visualizing such information. The medium is Montage!

Mike