CatWISE2020 Catalog Now Available

CatWISE is a program to catalog sources selected from combined WISE (The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) and NEOWISE (the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) all-sky survey data at 3.4 and 4.6 microns (W1 and W2). The CatWISE2020 Catalog consists of 1,890,715,640 sources measured in data collected from 2010 to 2018. CatWISE2020 represents six times as many exposures and spans over sixteen 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. CatWISE2020 includes the measured motion of sources during the more than 8 years spanned by the data, typically in 12 epochs. From comparison to Gaia, the motions are over a dozen times more accurate than those from AllWISE.

The primary differences between the CatWISE2020 and CatWISE Preliminary Catalogs are that CatWISE2020 includes two additional years of data, and that the detection list for CatWISE2020 was generated using "crowdsource" software (Schlafly et al. 2019). These two factors result in the CatWISE2020 Catalog having more than twice as many sources as the CatWISE Preliminary Catalog. In the Galactic plane, the CatWISE2020 source density is five times higher than in the CatWISE Preliminary Catalog. The 90% completeness depth for CatWISE2020 is at Vega magnitudes W1=17.7 and W2=17.3 at high Galactic latitude, about 1.7 mag deeper than in the Preliminary Catalog. The scatter in CatWISE2020 photometry with respect to Spitzer at high Galactic latitude is similar to that for the CatWISE Preliminary Catalog, reaching SNR 5 at approximately W1=17.7 and W2=16.5 mag, vs. W1=16.9 and W2=15.9 mag for AllWISE. 

The CatWISE Preliminary Catalog is available in the WISE/NEOWISE Enhanced & Contributed Products area of the NASA Infrared Science Archive, and also for tile-oriented access at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) Science Gateways. The CatWISE2020 Catalog is also available now at NERSC and will be available in the next few weeks via IRSA.

Further information is available on the CatWISE web page and in Eisenhardt et al. (2020).