The Large Magellanic Cloud

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One of the targets during the early WIRE mission will be the Large Magellanic Cloud. Here is a glimpse of what we might get. This is an IRAS HIRES image at 12, 25, and 60 microns. An image resolution enhancement technique has been used to improve the IRAS spatial resolution, which is about 0.4-1 arcminute in this image. This image is roughly 40 square degrees, making it one of the largest such images produced by IRAS. WIRE will be approximately 100x more sensitive. Furthermore, given the very high S/N that WIRE will have, deconvolution will probably produce images with 5x the spatial resolution of this image.

IRAS-HIRES image of the LMC. Red, green, and blue are mapped to 60, 25, and 12 microns, respectively. Stars appear as bright blue points, while most of the red emission is cirrus emission from dust. The big bright region is 30 Doradus. This image will be used to fill in the regions too bright for WIRE to look at, as well as to provide long wavelength information.

The survey plan for the LMC, courtesy of Frank Masci. The little circles are single WIRE images.