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II. The WISE All-Sky Data Products


4. Ancillary Products

a. Reject Table

The WISE All-Sky Reject Table contains 283,887,651 detections that were made on the Atlas Images during Multiframe Pipeline processing that were not included in the All-Sky Release Source Catalog because they did not satisfy the Catalog selection quality criteria described in V.3. These "source" extractions were rejected from the Catalog because:

WISE Multiframe Pipeline processing generated a Working Database of all detections on the Atlas Images from which both the Source Catalog and Reject Table are drawn. Therefore, the source detection and extraction algorithms are the same for both and are described in IV.4. Directions for accessing the Reject Table are given in I.3.

Users are strongly encouraged to read the Cautionary Notes before using the Reject Table.

i. Column Descriptions

The format of the Reject Table is the same as that for the All-Sky Source Catalog and is described in II.2.a.

ii. Using the Reject Table

As a rule of thumb, you should assume that every entry in the Reject Table is spurious until you have verified its reliability by visually examining its position on the Atlas Images.

The Reject Table is not a well-vetted list of reliable mid-infrared source detections. As the name implies, the majority of entries in the Reject Table are likely spurious detections of low SNR noise events, image artifacts, or transient pixel events such as cosmic rays. However, the Reject Table does contain some low SNR extractions of real sources, as well as reliable measurement of bright sources that may have been omitted from the Source Catalog because of overly conservative artifact flagging in some regions, or because they fall in areas with low Single-exposure depth-of-coverage. Used with caution, the Reject Table can be a useful database that augments the Source Catalog, particularly when following-up sources that appear on the Atlas Images but are not found in the Catalog.

The following are some examples where the Reject Table entries may be useful.

Last update: 2012 February 24


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