AWAIC: A WISE Astronomical Image Co-adder

Understand

We describe a new image co-addition tool, AWAIC, to support the creation of a digital Image Atlas from the multiple frame exposures acquired with the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

• AWAIC includes preparatory steps such as frame background matching and outlier detection using robust frame-stack statistics.
• Frame co-addition is based on using the detector's Point Response Function (PRF) as an interpolation kernel.
• This kernel reduces the impact of prior-masked pixels; enables the creation of an optimal matched filtered product for point source detection; and most important, it allows for resolution enhancement (HiRes) to yield a model of the sky that is consistent with the observations to within measurement error.