The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is a space-based imaging
survey of the entire sky in the 3.4 (W1), 4.6 (W2), 12 (W3), and 22 (W4) μm
mid-infrared. This is the project's reliable Source Catalog containing
accurate photometry and astrometry for over 500 million objects.
More details are available in the `Explanatory Supplement`_, which also
has a list of `Cautionary Notes`_.
.. _Explanatory Supplement: http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/expsup/sec1_1.html
.. _Cautionary Notes: http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/allsky/expsup/sec1_4b.html
The SPM4 Catalog contains absolute proper motions, celestial
coordinates, and B,V photometry for 103,319,647 stars and galaxies
between the south celestial pole and -20 degrees declination. The
catalog is roughly complete to V=17.5. It is based on photographic and
CCD observations taken with the Yale Southern Observatory's
double-astrograph at Cesco Observatory in El Leoncito, Argentina.
The zCOSMOS redshift survey used 600h on the VIMOS spectrograph spread over
five observing seasons (2005-2009) to obtain spectra of about 20,000 galaxies
selected to have Iab < 22.5 across the full 1.7 deg2 of the COSMOS field.
This part, "zCOSMOS-bright", was designed to yield a high and fairly uniform
sampling rate (about 70%), with a high success rate in measuring redshifts
(approaching 100% at 0.5 < z < 0.8), and with sufficient
velocity accuracy
(about 100 km/s) to efficiently map the environments of galaxies down to the
scale of galaxy groups out to redshifts z ~ 1.