A FULL-SKY, HIGH-RESOLUTION ATLAS OF GALACTIC 12μm DUST EMISSION WITH WISE

We describe our custom processing of the entire Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) 12 mu m imaging data set, and present a high-resolution, full-sky map of diffuse Galactic dust emission that is free of compact sources and other contaminating artifacts. The principal distinctions between our resulting co-added images and the WISE Atlas stacks are our removal of compact sources, including their associated electronic and optical artifacts, and our preservation of spatial modes larger than 1 degrees.5. We provide access to the resulting full-sky map via a set of 430 12 degrees.5 x 12 degrees.5 mosaics. These stacks have been smoothed to 15 '' resolution and are accompanied by corresponding coverage maps, artifact images, and bit-masks for point sources, resolved compact sources, and other defects. When combined appropriately with other mid-infrared and far-infrared data sets, we expect our WISE 12 mu m co-adds to form the basis for a full-sky dust extinction map with angular resolution several times better than Schlegel et al.