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unWISE Catalog

Metadata Updated: August 30, 2025

The unWISE Catalog contains the positions and fluxes of roughly two billion objects observed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) over the full sky. The unWISE Catalog has two advantages over the existing WISE catalog (AllWISE): first, it is based on significantly deeper imaging, and second, it features improved modeling of crowded regions. The deeper imaging used in the unWISE Catalog comes from the coaddition of all publicly available 3-5 micron WISE imaging, including that from the ongoing NEOWISE-Reactivation mission, thereby increasing the total exposure time by a factor of 5 relative to AllWISE. At these depths, even at high Galactic latitudes many sources are blended with their neighbors; accordingly, the unWISE analysis simultaneously fits thousands of sources to obtain accurate photometry. The unWISE catalog detects sources at 5 sigma roughly 0.7 magnitudes fainter than the AllWISE catalog and more accurately models millions of faint sources in the Galactic plane, enabling a wealth of Galactic and extragalactic science. In particular, relative to AllWISE, unWISE doubles the number of galaxies detected between redshifts 0 and 1 and triples the number between redshifts 1 and 2, cataloging more than half a billion galaxies over the whole sky.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date August 30, 2025

Metadata Source

Harvested from NASA Data.json

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
Metadata Updated Date August 30, 2025
Publisher NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive
Maintainer
Identifier ivo://irsa.ipac/wise/catalog/unwise
Data Last Modified 2025-08-27
Category Astrophysics
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 026:00
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id b9542ddc-0ee0-45b6-809d-bedc3be424a5
Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
Homepage URL https://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/data/WISE/unWISE/gator_docs/unwise_colDescriptions.html
Program Code 026:000
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 6b927247ccdc42e69e47b592477db677b22f15ae92d9064b9aecb0fd85b95f2a
Source Schema Version 1.1

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