An All-Sky Sample of Intermediate-Mass Star-Forming Regions
  We present an all-sky sample of 984 candidate intermediate-mass Galactic
star-forming regions color-selected from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite
(IRAS) Point Source Catalog and morphologically classify each object using
mid-infrared Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) images. Of the 984
candidates, 616 are probable star-forming regions (62.6%), 128 are filamentary
structures (13.0%), 39 are point-like objects of unknown nature (4.0%), and 201
are galaxies (20.4%). We conduct a study of four of these regions, IRAS
00259+5625, IRAS 00420+5530, IRAS 01080+5717, and IRAS 05380+2020, at Galactic
latitudes |b| > 5 degrees using optical spectroscopy from the Wyoming Infrared
Observatory along with near-infrared photometry from the Two-Micron All Sky
Survey to investigate their stellar content. New optical spectra,
color-magnitude diagrams, and color-color diagrams reveal their extinctions,
spectrophotometric distances, and the presence of small stellar clusters
containing 20-78 solar masses of stars. These low-mass diffuse star clusters
contain 65-250 stars for a typical initial mass function, including one or more
mid-B stars as their most massive constituents. Using infrared spectral energy
distributions we identify young stellar objects near each region and assign
probable masses and evolutionary stages to the protostars. The total infrared
luminosity lies in the range 190 to 960 solar luminosities, consistent with the
sum of the luminosities of the individually identified young stellar objects.
