A z=0 Multiwavelength Galaxy Synthesis. I. A WISE and GALEX Atlas of Local Galaxies

We present an atlas of ultraviolet and infrared images of similar to 15,750 local (d less than or similar to 50 Mpc) galaxies, as observed by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) missions. These maps have matched resolution (FWHM 7 ''.5 and 15 ''), matched astrometry, and a common procedure for background removal. We demonstrate that they agree well with resolved intensity measurements and integrated photometry from previous surveys. This atlas represents the first part of a program (the z = 0 Multiwavelength Galaxy Synthesis) to create a large, uniform database of resolved measurements of gas and dust in nearby galaxies. The images and associated catalogs will be publicly available at the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive. This atlas allows us estimate local and integrated star formation rates (SFRs) and stellar masses (M-*) across the local galaxy population in a uniform way. In the appendix, we use the population synthesis fits of Salim et al. to calibrate integrated M-* and SFR estimators based on GALEX and WISE. Because they leverage a Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)-based training set of >100,000 galaxies, these calibrations have high precision and allow us to rigorously compare local galaxies to SDSS results. We provide these SFR and M-* estimates for all galaxies in our sample and show that our results yield a main sequence of star-forming galaxies comparable to previous work. We also show the distribution of intensities from resolved galaxies in NUV-to-WISE1 versus WISE1-to-WISE3 space, which captures much of the key physics accessed by these bands.