14 DAY TRIAL // Astronomers at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) have just released a new catalog and atlas of objects in the night sky. Their dataset is based on information glimpsed by the NASA Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope during its second sweep of the full sky.
Since launching in 2010, the NASA observatory completed two full-sky surveys, one designed to identify new galaxies and other cosmic objects, and the other meant to identify asteroids and comets closer to Earth, within our solar system.
By over-imposing the two datasets, UCLA researchers were able to essentially double exposure times over every portion of the sky. This revealed a number of faint galaxies that did not appear clearly in any of the individual sky surveys. The new project was entitled AllWISE.
“By stacking up the data, we have created a monster database with dozens of individual measurements on every one of the infrared sources we detect,” says the principal investigator of the WISE mission, UCLA astronomer Ned Wright.