FULL-DEPTH COADDS OF THE WISE AND FIRST-YEAR NEOWISE-REACTIVATION IMAGES

ABSTRACT The Near Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) Reactivation mission released data from its first full year of observations in 2015. This data set includes ∼2.5 million exposures in each of W1 and W2, effectively doubling the amount of WISE imaging available at 3.4 m and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Astronomical journal 2017-01, Vol.153 (1), p.38-38
Main Authors: Meisner, Aaron M., Lang, Dustin, Schlegel, David J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
data analysis
Exposure
image processing
Imaging
infrared
infrared: general
Legacy
methods: data analysis
Missions
Quasars
Sky surveys (astronomy)
Spectroscopy
surveys
techniques: image processing
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Summary:ABSTRACT The Near Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) Reactivation mission released data from its first full year of observations in 2015. This data set includes ∼2.5 million exposures in each of W1 and W2, effectively doubling the amount of WISE imaging available at 3.4 m and 4.6 m relative to the AllWISE release. We have created the first ever full-sky set of coadds combining all publicly available W1 and W2 exposures from both the AllWISE and NEOWISE-Reactivation (NEOWISER) mission phases. We employ an adaptation of the unWISE image coaddition framework, which preserves the native WISE angular resolution and is optimized for forced photometry. By incorporating two additional scans of the entire sky, we not only improve the W1/W2 depths, but also largely eliminate time-dependent artifacts such as off-axis scattered moonlight. We anticipate that our new coadds will have a broad range of applications, including target selection for upcoming spectroscopic cosmology surveys, identification of distant/massive galaxy clusters, and discovery of high-redshift quasars. In particular, our full-depth AllWISE+NEOWISER coadds will be an important input for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument selection of luminous red galaxy and quasar targets. Our full-depth W1/W2 coadds are already in use within the DECam Legacy Survey (DECaLS) and Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS) reduction pipelines. Much more work still remains in order to fully leverage NEOWISER imaging for astrophysical applications beyond the solar system.
ISSN:0004-6256
1538-3881
1538-3881
DOI:10.3847/1538-3881/153/1/38