unWISE: unblurred coadds of the WISE imaging

TL;DR

This paper introduces unWISE, a new set of unblurred coadded WISE images that preserve the original resolution, enhancing photometric accuracy for various astronomical analyses.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel method for creating unblurred WISE coadds, improving upon previous blurred images for better signal-to-noise in photometry.

Findings

Unblurred coadds retain intrinsic resolution of WISE data.

Code and data are publicly available for community use.

Artifacts around bright structures are identified as ongoing work.

Abstract

The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE; Wright et al. 2010) satellite observed the full sky in four mid-infrared bands in the 2.8 to 28 micron range. The primary mission was completed in 2010. The WISE team have 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 (York et al. 2000) 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 .