The unWISE Catalog: Two Billion Infrared Sources from Five Years of WISE Imaging

By Edward F. Schlafly, A. Meisner, Gregory M. Green. Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2019

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We present the unWISE Catalog, containing the positions and fluxes of roughly 2 billion objects observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) over the full sky. The unWISE Catalog has two advantages over the existing WISE catalog (AllWISE): first, it is based on significantly deeper imaging, and second, it features improved modeling of crowded regions. The deeper imaging used in the unWISE Catalog comes from the coaddition of all publicly available 3–5 μm WISE imaging, including that from the ongoing NEOWISE-reactivation mission, thereby increasing the total exposure time by a factor of 5 relative to AllWISE. At these depths, even at high Galactic latitudes, many sources are blended with their neighbors; accordingly, the unWISE analysis simultaneously fits thousands of sources to obtain accurate photometry. Our new catalog detects sources roughly 0.7 magnitudes fainter than the AllWISE catalog at 5σ, and more accurately models millions of faint sources in the Galactic plane, enabling a wealth of Galactic and extragalactic science. In particular, relative to AllWISE, unWISE doubles the number of galaxies detected between redshifts 0 and 1 and triples the number between redshifts 1 and 2, cataloging more than half a billion galaxies over the whole sky.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b44d78d147a9483edfe5ca79554903c5dd4d876b

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Citations in the corpus

The CatWISE2020 Catalog (2020, methodology): “Note that these identifications end in “r02” to avoid confusion with unrelated sources in the unWISE Catalog of Schlafly et al. (2019).”
Survey Operations for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (2023, methodology): “Targeting catalogs also incorporated flux and astrometric measurements from Gaia, the Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer, and the Siena Galaxy Atlas (Gaia Collaboration et al. 2016; Cutri et al. 2013; Meisner et al. 2018; Schlafly et al. 2019; Moustakas et al. 2023).”