I. Introduction

I.4. Top 10 (or so) Things You Should Know About the NEOWISE Release Data Products

1. The NEOWISE annual Data Releases are comprised of data taken during the 10.6 years of the NEOWISE Reactivation mission, between 13 December 2013 and 1 August 2024 (I.2.c). Data from all years are concatenated into a single archive that may be queried easily at one time. (I.5)


2. Because NEOWISE acquired repeated observations of each point on the sky, there are usually multiple, independent measurements of solar system, galactic and extragalactic objects in the NEOWISE Single-exposure Images and Source Database. (I.2.b.i)


3. The NEOWISE Single-exposure Images are a resource for solar system object precovery, recovery and analysis, as well as for combining with original WISE mission Single-exposure images to enable deeper detections for stationary objects. (III.1)


4. The NEOWISE Source Database is a time-domain resource useful for obtaining the positions and thermal fluxes of moving solar system objects, as well as for studying the motions of nearby brown dwarfs and stars, and the flux variability of all sources. (II.1.b)


5. The NEOWISE Data Release products consist of W1 (3.4 μm) and W2 (4.6 μm) image and extracted source data only. NEOWISE did not collect data in the W3 (12 μm) and W4 (22 μm) bands. (I.2.a.ii)


6. The sensitivity of the NEOWISE W1 and W2 photometry is similar to, but generally not quite as good as during the WISE Full Cryogenic survey phase. (II.1.c, II.1.e)


7. The NEOWISE photometric calibration is stable to better than 1.5% in W1 over the full survey. The W2 calibration exhibits small uncorrected seasonal variations of up to ~0.03 mags that are correlated with focal plane temperature up until the final two months of survey operations. During the final month of the survey the uncorrected W2 calibration offset reached nearly 0.06 mag. (IV.2.d.ii)


8. The NEOWISE Releases include all image and extracted source information, regardless of the quality of the observations. Use the quality information provided with image metadata and individual entries in the Source Database to select the best quality observations. (II.2.d, III.2.d)


9. Profile-fit photometry of bright, saturated sources in the NEOWISE Single-exposure Source Database is systematically brighter than measurements in the AllWISE and All-Sky Release Catalogs, and the difference between them increases with increasing source brightness. (II.1.c.ii)


10. The NEOWISE Release products include only the Single-exposure images and a database of sources extracted from those images. The NEOWISE Single-exposure images have not been coadded, nor has a deep inertial source Catalog been produced from coadded images. (IV.1)


11. NEOWISE Moving Object Tracklets are available from the IAU Minor Planet Center. The NEOWISE Single-exposure Images, Source Database and ancillary tables are available from the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive. (I.5)

Last update: 17 August 2024