The IRAS Galaxy Atlas

A high resolution image atlas of the Galactic plane at 60 and 100 micron has been produced using the IRAS satellite data. Massively parallel computers located at Caltech provided the horsepower to perform the image reconstruction and resolution enhancement.

Overview

The Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) carried out a nearly complete survey of the infrared sky, and the survey data are important for the study of many astrophysical phenomena. However, many data sets at other wavelengths have higher resolution than that of the co-added IRAS maps, and high resolution IRAS images are strongly desired both for their own information content and their usefulness in correlation studies.

The IGA images can be used in conjunction with the data from the DRAO HI line / 21cm continuum survey and the FCRAO CO (1-0) line survey, both covering the Galactic plane with ~ 1 arcmin resolution.

The HIRES program was developed by the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) to produce high resolution (~ 1 arcmin) images from IRAS data using the Maximum Correlation Method (H.H. Aumann, J.W. Fowler and M. Melnyk, 1990).

We ported HIRES to the Intel Paragon, a massively parallel supercomputer, which enabled the project to map the Galactic plane at 60 and 100 micron.

Images produced from the MCM algorithm sometimes suffer from visible striping and ringing artifacts. Correcting detector gain offsets and using a Burg entropy metric in the reconstruction scheme were found to be effective in suppressing these artifacts.

The completely processed images were delivered to the National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC: IRAS High Resolution Galaxy Atlas). Data for the 30 most extended nearby galaxies at 12, 25, 60, and 100 micron (Rice, W., 1993) can be obtained from the NASA LAMBDA Products site.

Demo Images

Orion

IRSA Image

3200 x 2400 (13.3 deg x 10 deg), 461 KB JPEG. High resolution image (~ 1 arcmin) of the Orion molecular cloud at 60 micron, shown at the conference Supercomputing '94, as a demonstration displayed with the 8 ft x 6 ft PowerWall, built by the University of Minnesota, SGI, and IBM. Production took 300 node-hours on the Intel Paragon (a massively parallel supercomputer produced in the 1990s but now discontinued), operated by Caltech for the Concurrent Supercomputing Consortium. Data came from the IRAS survey.

W3-5

IRSA Image

5521 x 2161 (23 deg x 9 deg), 566 KB JPEG.

Publications

Personnel

  • Principal Investigators:
  • Co-Investigators:
    • Susan Terebey, formerly at Caltech IPAC.
    • Yu Cao, formely graduate student at Caltech Physics.

Links

  • IPAC Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
  • SRL Space Radiation Lab
  • Caltech HPC Resnick High Performance Computing Center
  • JPL Jet Propulsion Laboratory
  • NSSDC National Space Science Data Center
  • NASA National Aeronautics and Space Administration