unWISE
Description
The unWISE Catalog is a deep, deblended catalog of sources from the unWISE coadds of the WISE images, covering the entire sky at 3.4 and 4.6 microns. The unWISE coadds (Meisner et al. 2019) include the images from the NEOWISE phase of the WISE mission, giving them five times the exposure time of the coadds from the initial WISE survey. The unWISE Catalog contains more than two billion sources from these coadds.
The WISE point spread function has a full-width at half-maximum of about 6" in the W1 and W2 bands used for NEOWISE, which coupled with the large number of sources detected in the deep WISE imaging means that most sources overlap with other sources in the images. To accurately model the photometry of these blended sources, the unWISE team uses the crowdsource analysis pipeline (Schlafly et al. 2018) to simultaneously determine the positions and fluxes of all sources in the unWISE coadds.
The greater depth of the unWISE coadds relative to coadds from the first year of the WISE survey, combined with the crowdsource crowded-field modeling, allows the unWISE team to measure fluxes for roughly three times as many sources as were detected in the AllWISE catalog.
For more details about the unWISE Catalog, visit the main unWISE Catalog website and read the associated paper (Schlafly et al. 2019).
The unwise_dr1.object table has been crossmatched with all other datasets in Data Lab within a 1.5 arcsec radius, nearest neighbor only. These tables will appear with x1p5 in their name in our table browser. Example: unwise_dr1.x1p5__object__gaia_dr3__gaia_source.
Data Releases
First Data Release (unWISE DR1)
The co-added images, and resulting catalogs are respectively described in the papers by Meisner et al. (2019) and by Schlafly et al. (2019).
| unWISE DR1 Tables | |
|---|---|
| Table Name | Description |
| object | Most columns in the unWISE band-merged catalogs are identical to the individual-image catalogs, and include W1 and W2 measurements of a source. |
Figure credit: Dustin Lang (Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics; University of Waterloo)
Data Access
The unWISE data are accessible by a variety of means:
Data Lab Table Access Protocol (TAP) service
TAP provides a convenient access layer to the unWISE catalog database. TAP-aware clients (such as TOPCAT) can point to https://datalab.noirlab.edu/tap, select the unwise_dr1 database, and see the database tables and descriptions. You can also view the unWISE tables and descriptions in the Data Lab table browser.
Data Lab Query Client
The Query Client is available as part of the Data Lab software distribution. The Query Client provides a Python API to Data Lab database services. These services include anonymous and authenticated access through synchronous or asynchronous queries of the catalog made directly to the database. Additional Data Lab services for registered users include personal database storage and storage through the Data Lab VOSpace.
The Query Client can be called from a Jupyter Notebook on the Data Lab Notebook server. Example notebooks are provided to users upon creation of their user account (register here), and are also available to browse on GitHub at https://github.com/astro-datalab/notebooks-latest.
Image Cutouts
Image cutouts can be retrieved from the Legacy Surveys Sky Viewer following this notation:
FITS: http://legacysurvey.org/viewer/fits-cutout/?ra=218.3643&dec=52.8691&layer=unwise-neo4&pixscale=32.00
JPEG: http://legacysurvey.org/viewer/jpeg-cutout/?ra=218.3643&dec=52.8691&layer=unwise-neo4&pixscale=32.00
Jupyter Notebook Server
The Data Lab Jupyter Notebook server (authenticated service) contains examples of how to access and visualize the unWISE catalog:
Acknowledgments
The unWISE coadded images and catalog are based on data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, and NEOWISE, which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology. WISE and NEOWISE are funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The unWISE Catalog analysis was run on the Odyssey cluster supported by the FAS Division of Science, Research Computing Group at Harvard University, and on the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231. The unWISE nebulosity CNN was trained on the XStream computational resource, supported by the National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation program (ACI-1429830).
Generating the unWISE catalog included use of the HyperLeda database (http://leda.univ-lyon1.fr).
Database access and other data services are hosted by the Astro Data Lab at the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC) of the National Science Foundation's National Optical Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.
This work has been supported in part by NASA ADAP grant NNH17AE75I. Eddie Schlafly and Aaron M. Meisner acknowledge support for this work provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grants HST-HF2-51367.001-A and HST-HF2-51415.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555. ES and AMM acknowledge additional support by the Director, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231, and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science User Facility under the same contract.
