CatWISE Preliminary Catalog Now Available

CatWISE is a program to catalog sources selected from combined Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) all-sky survey data at 3.4 and 4.6 microns (W1 and W2).

The CatWISE Preliminary catalog consists of 900,849,014 sources measured in data collected from 2010 to 2016. This dataset represents four times as many exposures and spans over ten times as large a time baseline as that used for the AllWISE catalog. CatWISE adapts AllWISE software to measure the sources in coadded images created from six-month subsets of these data, each representing one coverage of the inertial sky, or epoch. The catalog includes the measured motion of sources in 8 epochs over the 6.5-year span of the data. From comparison to Spitzer, the SNR=5 limits in magnitudes in the Vega system are W1=17.67 and W2=16.47, compared to W1=16.90 and W2=15.95 for AllWISE. From comparison to Gaia, CatWISE positions have typical accuracies of 50 mas for stars at W1=10 mag and 275 mas for stars at W1=15.5 mag. Proper motions have typical accuracies of 10 mas/yr and 30 mas/yr for stars with these brightnesses, an order of magnitude better than from AllWISE.

The catalog is available in the WISE/NEOWISE Enhanced & Contributed Products area of the NASA Infrared Science Archive. 

Further information is available at on the CatWISE webpage and on the arxiv.