Tails identifies and localizes comets in image data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a robotic optical sky survey, using deep-learning with a custom EfficientDet-based architecture. It detects comets in single images in near real time, rather than requiring multiple epochs as in traditional methods. In production, Tails achieves 99% recall, a false positive rate below 0.01%, and 1–2 pixel root mean square error in the predicted position.

Montage is an open source code toolkit for assembling Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) images into custom mosaics. It runs on all common Linux/Unix platforms, on desktops, clusters and computational grids, and supports all World Coordinate System (WCS) projections and common coordinate systems. Montage preserves spatial and calibration fidelity of input images, processes 40 million pixels in up to 32 minutes on 128 nodes on a Linux cluster, and provides independent engines for analyzing the geometry of images on the sky, re-projecting images, rectifying background emission to a common level, and co-adding images. It offers convenient tools for managing and manipulating large image files.