Tegmark et al. (TOH) Reduced-Foreground CMB Map

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From the abstract of Tegmark, de Oliveira-Costa, & Hamilton: "We perform an independent foreground analysis of the WMAP maps to produce a cleaned CMB map useful for cross-correlation with, e.g., galaxy and X-ray maps. We use a variant of the Tegmark & Efstathiou (1996) technique that is completely blind, making no assumptions about the CMB power spectrum, the foregrounds, WMAP detector noise or external templates. Compared with the foreground-cleaned internal linear combination map produced by the WMAP team, our map has the advantage of containing less non-CMB power (from foregrounds and detector noise) outside the Galactic plane. The difference is most important on the angular scale of the first acoustic peak and below, since our cleaned map is at the highest (13') rather than lowest (49') WMAP resolution. We also produce a Wiener filtered CMB map, representing our best guess as to what the CMB sky actually looks like. We argue that our CMB map is clean enough that the lowest multipoles can be measured without any galaxy cut."

More details can be found in:

A high resolution foreground cleaned CMB map from WMAP", M. Tegmark, A. de Oliveira-Costa, & A. Hamilton, PRD 68, 123523 (2003).

A method for subtracting foregrounds from multifrequency CMB sky maps" M. Tegmark and G. Efstathiou, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 281, 1297 (1996).