unWISE Time-Domain Catalog

https://doi.org/10.26131/IRSA580
https://www.ipac.caltech.edu/doi/10.26131/IRSA580

10.26131/IRSA580

IPAC

Meisner, Aaron M.; Caselden, Dan; Schlafly, Edward F.; Kiwy, Frank

unWISE Time-Domain Catalog

The unWISE Time-Domain Catalog is a deep time-domain catalog of detections based on Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and NEOWISE observations spanning the 2010 through 2020 time period. Detections are extracted from "time-resolved unWISE coadds", which stack together each biannual sky pass of WISE imaging to create a set of ∼16 all-sky maps (per band), each much deeper and cleaner than individual WISE exposures. The unWISE Time-Domain Catalog incorporates the W1 (3.4 µm) and W2 (4.6 µm) channels, meaning that the data set effectively consists of ∼32 full-sky unWISE catalogs. The crowdsource crowded-field point source photometry pipeline (Schlafly et al. 2018) was run on each epochal coadd independently, with low detection thresholds: S/N = 4.0 (2.5) in W1 (W2). In total, the catalog contains 23.5 billion (19.9 billion) detections at W1 (W2). The unWISE Time-Domain Catalog is ∼1.3 mag deeper than the WISE/NEOWISE Single Exposure Source Tables near the ecliptic, with further enhanced depth toward higher ecliptic latitudes. It is primarily designed to enable novel searches for faint, fast-moving objects, such as Y dwarfs and/or late-type (T/Y) subdwarfs in the Milky Way’s thick disk or halo. It will also facilitate other time-domain science applications, such as all-sky studies of quasar variability at mid-infrared wavelengths over a decade-long time baseline.

This dataset or service is made available by the Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) at IPAC, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Dataset

https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/WISE/unWISE/overview.html

neo7