The AllWISE program builds upon the work of the successful Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission (WISE; Wright et al. 2010) by combining data from the WISE cryogenic and NEOWISE (Mainzer et al. 2011 ApJ, 731, 53) post-cryogenic survey phases to form the most comprehensive view of the full mid-infrared sky currently available. By combining the data from two complete sky coverage epochs using an advanced data processing system, AllWISE has generated new products that have enhanced photometric sensitivity and accuracy, and improved astrometric precision compared to the 2012 WISE All-Sky Data Release. Exploiting the 6 to 12 month baseline between the WISE sky coverage epochs enables AllWISE to measure source motions for the first time, and to compute improved flux variability statistics. The AllWISE Atlas Metadata Table contains brief descriptions of all metadata information that is relevant to the production of the Atlas images and Source Catalog. The table contains the (RA, DEC) of the center of the Tile. Much of the information in this table is processing-specific and may not be of interest to general users (e.g., flags indicating whether frames have been processed successfully or not, and the date and time of the start of the pipeline processing, etc.). The metadata table also contains some characterization and derived statistics of the coadd image Tile, basic photometric parameters used for photometry and derived statistics for extracted sources and artifacts.

The AllWISE program builds upon the work of the successful Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission (WISE; Wright et al. 2010) by combining data from the WISE cryogenic and NEOWISE (Mainzer et al. 2011 ApJ, 731, 53) post-cryogenic survey phases to form the most comprehensive view of the full mid-infrared sky currently available. By combining the data from two complete sky coverage epochs using an advanced data processing system, AllWISE has generated new products that have enhanced photometric sensitivity and accuracy, and improved astrometric precision compared to the 2012 WISE All-Sky Data Release. Exploiting the 6 to 12 month baseline between the WISE sky coverage epochs enables AllWISE to measure source motions for the first time, and to compute improved flux variability statistics. The AllWISE Reject Table contains the source extractions that do not meet the uniqueness and/or reliability criteria required for inclusion in the Source Catalog.

The AllWISE program builds upon the work of the successful Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission (WISE; Wright et al. 2010) by combining data from the WISE cryogenic and NEOWISE (Mainzer et al. 2011 ApJ, 731, 53) post-cryogenic survey phases to form the most comprehensive view of the full mid-infrared sky currently available. By combining the data from two complete sky coverage epochs using an advanced data processing system, AllWISE has generated new products that have enhanced photometric sensitivity and accuracy, and improved astrometric precision compared to the 2012 WISE All-Sky Data Release. Exploiting the 6 to 12 month baseline between the WISE sky coverage epochs enables AllWISE to measure source motions for the first time, and to compute improved flux variability statistics. The AllWISE Multiepoch Photometry (MEP) Database is a compendium of time-tagged fluxes measured on the individual Single-exposure image sets forced at the position of each deep source extraction that is in the AllWISE Source Catalog and Reject Table.

This table contains an all-sky sample of ~1.4 million active galactic nuclei (AGNs) meeting a two-color infrared photometric selection criterion for AGNs as applied to sources from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer final catalog release (AllWISE). The authors assess the spatial distribution and optical properties of their sample and find that the results are consistent with expectations for AGNs. These sources have a mean density of ~38 AGNs per square degree on the sky, and their apparent magnitude distribution peaks at g ~ 20, extending to objects as faint as g ~ 26. The authors test the AGN selection criterion against a large sample of optically identified stars and determine the "leakage" (that is, the probability that a star detected in an optical survey will be misidentified as a quasi-stellar object (QSO) in their sample) rate to be <= 4.0 x 10^-5. They conclude that their sample contains almost no optically identified stars (<= 0.041%), making this sample highly promising for future celestial reference frame work as it significantly increases the number of all-sky, compact extragalactic objects. The authors further compare their sample to catalogs of known AGNs/QSOs and find a completeness value of >= 84% (that is, the probability of correctly identifying a known AGN/QSO is at least 84%) for AGNs brighter than a limiting magnitude of R <= 19. This sample includes approximately 1.1 million previously uncataloged AGNs. The WISE survey is an all-sky mid-IR survey at 3.4, 4.6, 12, and 22 microns (W1, W2, W3, and W4, respectively) conducted between 2010 January 7 and August 6, during the cryogenic mission phase, and first made available to the public on 2011 April 14. WISE has angular resolutions of 6.1, 6.4, 6.5, and 12.0 arcseconds in its four bands, respectively. The AllWISE data release, which was used for this work, incorporates data from the WISE Full Cryogenic, 3-Band Cryo, and NEOWISE Post-Cryo survey (Mainzer et al. 2014, ApJ, 792, 30) phases, which were co-added to achieve a depth of coverage ~0.4 mag deeper than previous data releases. AllWISE contains the positions, apparent motions, magnitudes, and point-spread function (PSF)-profile fit information for almost 748 million objects. Astrometric calibration of sources in the WISE catalog was done by correlation with bright stars from the 2MASS point source catalog, and the astrometric accuracy for sources in the AllWISE release was further improved by taking into account the proper motions of these reference stars, taken from the fourth USNO CCD Astrograph Catalog (UCAC4, Zacharias et al. 2013, AJ, 145, 44). A comparison with ICRF sources shows that AllWISE Catalog sources in the brightness range of 8 < W1 < 12 mag have positional accuracies to within 50 mas, and half of these sources have positional accuracies to within 20 mas. For more details on the WISE mission, see Wright et al. (2010, AJ, 140, 1868). The authors took all sources from the AllWISE catalog following Equations (3) and (4) from Mateos et al. (2012, MNRAS, 426, 3271) and they require that all of their sources have S/N >= 5 in the first three bands, as recommended in Mateos et al. (2012); as a further constraint, they limit their results to those with cc_flags = "0000," meaning that the sources are unaffected by known artifacts such as diffraction spikes, persistence, halos, or optical ghosts. In order to characterize the optical properties of their sample, the authors cross-matched it to SDSS-DR12, which is the final data release of SDSS-III (Eisenstein et al. 2011, AJ, 142, 72), within a radial tolerance of R < 1", obtaining 424,366 matches. To determine the fraction of false positive positional matches (that is, incorrectly correlating an object in their sample with a different SDSS object due to random positional agreement), they performed the same match on a scrambled version of their sample coordinates, determining that less than 1% of other cross-matches are false positive

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE; Wright et al. 2010) mapped the sky at 3.4, 4.6, 12, and 22 μm (W1, W2, W3, W4) in 2010 with an angular resolution of 6.1", 6.4", 6.5", & 12.0" in the four bands. WISE achieved 5σ point source sensitivities better than 0.08, 0.11, 1 and 6 mJy in unconfused regions on the ecliptic in the four bands. Sensitivity improves toward the ecliptic poles due to denser coverage and lower zodiacal background.The All-Sky Release includes all data taken during the WISE full cryogenic mission phase, 7 January 2010 to 6 August 2010, that were processed with improved calibrations and reduction algorithms. Release data products include an Atlas of 18,240 match-filtered, calibrated and coadded image sets, a Source Catalog containing positional and photometric information for over 563 million objects detected on the WISE images, and an Explanatory Supplement that is a guide to the format, content, characteristics and cautionary notes for the WISE All-Sky Release products.The WISE All-Sky Data Release Single-exposure Source Working Database contains positions and brightness information, uncertainties, time of observation and assorted quality flags for 9,479,433,101 "sources" detected on the individual WISE 7.7s (W1 and W2) and 8.8s (W3 and W4) Single-exposure images. Because WISE scanned every point on the sky multiple times, the Single-exposure Database contains multiple, independent measurements of objects on the sky.Entries in the Single-exposure Source Table include detections of real astrophysical objects, as well as spurious detections of low SNR noise excursions, transient events such as hot pixels, charged particle strikes and satellite streaks, and image artifacts light from bright sources including the moon. Many of the unreliable detections are flagged in the Single-exposure Table, but they have not been filtered out as they were for the Source Catalog. Therefore, the Table must be used with caution. Users are strongly encouraged to read the Cautionary Notes before using the Table.