II. User's Guide to the WISE Preliminary Data Release

1. General Properties of the Data Release

• Range of Dates Over Which Release Data Were Acquired:
  
  
  • 2010 January 14 11:45:13 UTC to 2010 April 29 00:14:03 UTC


• Number of Scans and Single-Exposures Represented in the Release:
  
  
  • Scans:    3,192
  
  
  • Single-Exposures:
  • Total number in all scans:    754,854
  • Number of framesets used in Multiframe processing after quality and dynamic filtering (see V.2):
  
  

  W1	693,143
  W2	692,031
  W3	668,388
  W4	665,429




• Number of 1.564°x1.564° Atlas Tiles Included in Release:    10,464


• Release Tile selection is described in V.2.b


• Area of Release:
  
  
  • Nominal area covered in 10,464 Tiles: ~23,666 deg² (57.4% of the sky)
  
  
  • Effective area covered as a function of Single-exposure depth-of-coverage in each band (see VI.2.b):

  Figure 1- W1	Figure 2- W2
  Figure 3 - W3	Figure 4 - W4
  Cumulative histograms showing the effective area of the Preliminary Release as a function of Single-exposure depth-of-coverage in each band.

  • The effective area of the Source Catalog is further reduced because of a 50" tile edge clearance requirement, and because of the the obscuring effects of bright stars (VI.2.c.ii).
  
  
• All-Sky Maps
  

  Figure 5 - Aitoff equatorial projection showing a color composite Atlas Image mosaic covering the 10,464 Tiles in the Preliminary Data Release. Celestial north is towards the top and right ascension increases to the left.

  Figure 6 - Hammer galactic projection showing a composite (W1-blue, W3-green, W4-red) surface density map in 0.2°x0.2° bins for the Preliminary Release Source Catalog. Galactic north is towards the top and galactic longitude increases to the right.

  
  
  

Last Updated: 2011 April 15