unWISE: UNBLURRED COADDS OF THE WISE IMAGING

By Dustin Lang. 2014

280 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite observed the full sky in four mid-infrared bands in the 2.8–28 μm range. The primary mission was completed in 2010. The WISE team has done a superb job of producing a series of high-quality, well-documented, complete data releases in a timely manner. However, the “Atlas Image” coadds that are part of the recent AllWISE and previous data releases were intentionally blurred. Convolving the images by the point-spread function while coadding results in “matched-filtered” images that are close to optimal for detecting isolated point sources. But these matched-filtered images are sub-optimal or inappropriate for other purposes. For example, we are photometering the WISE images at the locations of sources detected in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey through forward modeling, and this blurring decreases the available signal-to-noise by effectively broadening the point-spread function. This paper presents a new set of coadds of the WISE images that have not been blurred. These images retain the intrinsic resolution of the data and are appropriate for photometry preserving the available signal-to-noise. Users should be cautioned, however, that the W3- and W4-band coadds contain artifacts around large, bright structures (large galaxies, dusty nebulae, etc.); eliminating these artifacts is the subject of ongoing work. These new coadds, and the code used to produce them, are publicly available at http://unwise.me.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e0c2afdb11639afb8cf46420429df3146f44298

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Citations in the corpus

Validation of the Scientific Program for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (2023, methodology): “These models were also used to compute new photometric measurements in all four of the WISE bandpasses, as in Lang (2014); Lang et al. (2016b); Meis-ner et al. (2017).”
THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH DATA RELEASES OF THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY: FINAL DATA FROM SDSS-III (2015, methodology): “A number of programs use a reprocessing of the WISE data (Lang 2014) or forced photometry of WISE images at positions from SDSS (Lang et al. 2014).”
The DESI Experiment Part I: Science,Targeting, and Survey Design (2016, methodology): “8) measured on the re-stacked WISE and NEOWISE Level 1 imaging that retains the intrinsic resolution of the data and are appropriate for preserving the available signalto-noise [241].”
THE SDSS-IV EXTENDED BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: QUASAR TARGET SELECTION (2015, methodology): “Force-photometer WISE imaging at the positions of the resulting sources using the Lang (2014) approach, or, equivalently, match to the forcephotometered catalog of Lang et al. (2014).”
The unWISE Catalog: Two Billion Infrared Sources from Five Years of WISE Imaging (2019, methodology): “The unWISE coaddition procedure is described in Lang (2014) and Meisner et al. (2017a, 2017b, 2018a).”
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: Fourteenth data release (2017, methodology): “The “unWISE” coadded photometry is applied to sources detected in the SDSS imaging data as described in Lang (2014).”
The clustering of the SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey DR14 quasar sample: First measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations between redshift 0.8 and 2.2 (2017, methodology): “All targeting is based on the publicly available unWISE co-added photometry force matched to SDSS photometry presented in Lang (2014).”
WISE PHOTOMETRY FOR 400 MILLION SDSS SOURCES (2014, methodology): “Instead, we use the “unWISE” coadds from Lang (2014), which preserve the resolution of the original WISE images.”
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Quasar Catalog: Sixteenth Data Release (2020, methodology): “…of the eBOSS quasar targets had fluxes below the WISE detection limit used for the AllWISE Data Release, so forced photometry was applied to custom “unWISE” stacks (Lang 2014), as described in Lang et al. (2016).41 DR16Q contains 747,962 objects with a positive flux in either the W1 or W2 bands.”
A z = 0 Multiwavelength Galaxy Synthesis. I. A WISE and GALEX Atlas of Local Galaxies (2019, methodology): “We built our unWISE images with the same 2.75′′ pixel scale as Lang (2014).”
Overview of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys (2018, methodology): “The result was a set of mid-infrared flux estimates for all SDSS objects, constructed so that the sum of flux-weighted profiles best matched the WISE images (Lang 2014; Lang et al. 2016b).”
The Field Substellar Mass Function Based on the Full-sky 20 pc Census of 525 L, T, and Y Dwarfs (2020, methodology): “As stated in section 3.2, some of our Spitzer astrometry from Cycle 14 lacked a sufficient time baseline with which to disentangle proper motion and parallax, so we supplemented the Spitzer data with positions derived from the unWISE (Lang 2014) "time-resolved" coadds of Meisner et al. (2018a,b).”
Pōniuā‘ena: A Luminous z = 7.5 Quasar Hosting a 1.5 Billion Solar Mass Black Hole (2020, methodology): “In this step, both the ALLWISE and unWISE (Lang 2014; Meisner et al. 2018) images were included.”