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III. NEOWISE Single-exposure Images

III.1. General Properties


  1. Description and Format
  2. Single-exposure Image Header Description
  3. Single-exposure Image Metadata Column Descriptions
  4. Single-exposure Image Inventory Table Column Descriptions


III.1.a. Description and Format

The 2024 NEOWISE Data Release brings to 25,345,540 the total number of NEOWISE Single-exposure image sets available. These were produced using improved calibrations and data processing algorithms than those used to support earlier WISE releases (section IV.1.b).

Each Single-exposure image set consists of three 1016 x 1016 pixel images @ 2.75"/pix formatted in the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS). The FITS headers contain World Coordinate System (WCS) information following the standard for astronomical image data with field-of-view distortion represented in the "Simple Imaging Polynomial" (SIP) format. See section III.1.b for an example header.

The three elements of each image set are:

Section III.3 provides advice on how to use these products.

The single-exposure image products have the following generic filenames:

where BAND = 1 or 2 and frameID is a unique identification string pertaining to the image set. frameID has the form SSSSxMMM, where SSSSSx is the identifier of the scan in which the frameset was taken, scan_id, and MMM is the frame number, frame_num, within the scan. BAND and frameID are variables that match the values of keywords with the same name in FITS headers. The WISE Single-exposure Image FITS header content is described in III.1.b.

The Single-exposure (L1) Image Metadata Table provides additional information about the WISE Single-exposure image sets including much of the image header content and derived statistical and quality assessment information pertaining to both the Single-exposure images and extracted source database. This metadata table can be searched using the IRSA Catalog Query Engine.

CAUTION: The NEOWISE single-exposure image archive contains all images in the scans that are part of the NEOWISE Data Release scope (section I.3), regardless of their quality. Many of these framesets suffer from the following problems:

Example images showing some of these problems can be seen in section III.2, the Single-exposure Cautionary Notes.

You can identify single-exposure image sets that are of good quality using several of the keywords in the FITS headers and/or values in the metadata tables as follows:


III.1.b. Single-exposure Image Header Descriptions


III.1.c. Single-exposure Image Metadata Column Descriptions


III.1.d. Single-exposure Image Inventory Table Column Descriptions


III.2. Cautionary Notes



Last update: 6 February 2024


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