unWISE: UNBLURRED COADDS OF THE WISE IMAGING

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite observed the full sky in four mid-infrared bands in the 2.8-28 mu m 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 timel...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Astronomical journal Vol. 147; no. 5; pp. 108 - 10
Main Author Lang, Dustin
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.05.2014
Subjects
ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
Blurred
Blurring
DATA ANALYSIS
FILTERS
GALAXIES
Image detection
IMAGE PROCESSING
INFRARED SURVEYS
Mathematical models
NEBULAE
NOISE
PHOTOMETERS
PHOTOMETRY
RESOLUTION
SATELLITES
Signal to noise ratio
SIMULATION
SKY
Sky surveys (astronomy)
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Summary:The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite observed the full sky in four mid-infrared bands in the 2.8-28 mu m 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.
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ISSN:0004-6256
1538-3881
1538-3881
DOI:10.1088/0004-6256/147/5/108