Overview

The CatWISE2020 Catalog contains positions and brightnesses for 1,890,715,640 sources selected from combined WISE and NEOWISE all-sky survey data collected from 2010 to 2018 at 3.4 and 4.6 microns (W1 and W2). The CatWISE Preliminary Catalog contains positions and brightnesses for 900,849,014 sources collected from 2010 to 2016. CatWISE adapts AllWISE software to measure the sources in co-added images created from six month subsets of these data, each representing one coverage of the inertial sky, or epoch. The catalog includes the measured motion of sources in 12 epochs over the 8 year span of the data for CatWISE2020, and in 8 epochs over the 6 year span of the data for the Preliminary Catalog (note this table provides corrections for a small systematic astrometric error in CatWISE2020, typically 30 mas in position and 10 mas per year in motion, as discussed in section 3.3 of Marocco et al. (2020)). The detection list for CatWISE2020 relies on "crowdsource" software and comes from an updated version of the 10-epoch unWISE catalog (Schlafly et al. 2019), while the Preliminary Catalog used "MDET" software (the detection software used for AllWISE; Marsh and Jarrett 2012) to generate the detection list. The crowdsource software is much better at recovering source detections in high-density regions such as the Galactic plane.

Sources were measured in unWISE coadded images that divide the sky into 18,240 tiles using the WISE Atlas tile footprint. Catalog sources are required to be from the tile where that source is furthest from the tile edge, and to have both SNR ≥ 5 and no identified artifacts (i.e. a "0" in the corresponding "ab_flags" character) in the same band, which can be either W1 or W2. The 167,831,546 CatWISE Preliminary sources and 341,799,385 CatWISE2020 sources that fail to meet these criteria are provided in the corresponding CatWISE Reject Table. There are 185 columns in the CatWISE2020 Catalog on IRSA, with brief descriptions provided in the table below. The CatWISE Reject Tables include an additional column ("P") indicating whether the source meets the requirement to be furthest from its tile edge. The CatWISE2020 Catalog contains three columns not shown in the CatWISE Preliminary Catalog: 'glon' and 'glat' which were omitted because they were not computed correctly, and 'unwise_objid' to facilitate cross-matching with the detection list. Additional information about most of the columns is given in section II.1.a of the AllWISE Explanatory Supplement with CatWISE differences described in Table A1 of Eisenhardt et al. (2020).

If you use CatWISE data, please cite Eisenhardt et al. (2020), which provides details on CatWISE and the Preliminary Catalog. Marocco et al. (2020) describes updates for the CatWISE2020 Catalog. For more information, see the CatWISE2020 README, the CatWISE Preliminary README, or the CatWISE Project web page.