Special Plates

A few plates were drilled with all science bundles and half of the flux-calibration mini-bundles on empty skies. These helped us evaluate the sky subtraction quality. We observed these plates multiple times on multiple cartridges to test the quality of each cartridges, and on different airmasses and sky brightness conditions.

• Plate 7341
• Plate 7342
• Plate 7343
• Plate 8069

This plate was designed with all bundles on standard stars to test the flux calibration. It was observed during commissioning in March 2014.

• Plate 7444

These two regular galaxy plates were observed during commissioning of the MaNGA instrument in March 2014. Two fiber bundles on plate 7443 are intentionally drilled offset from the target galaxy center to include a nearby star in order to assess the accuracy of the astrometry registration routine in our pipeline.

• Plate 7443
• Plate 7495

These two plate were drilled to have the same set of galaxies but different standard stars. They were used to check the flux calibration accuracy.

• Plate 8256
• Plate 8274

As part of the Coma ancillary program we drilled a number of plates for deep observations of galaxies in the Coma galaxy cluster. Four of those plates are now being released with DR15:

• Plate 8479
• Plate 8480
• Plate 8953
• Plate 9051

Note that the data released for the Coma cluster are non-standard in multiple ways and not fully documented; it should be used only at your own risk.

As described in the IC342 ancillary program we have drilled multiple plates to mosaic a large region of the nearby IC342 galaxy. This program is ongoing but some data have been released with DR15.

• Plate 9673
• Plate 9674
• Plate 9675

As with the Coma plates, these data should be used only with the utmost precaution.

Similar to IC342, we used MaNGA IFU bundles to target a set of regions of interest in M31. Details can be found in the M31 ancillary program. As part of DR15, two plates with M31 data are being released:

• Plate 9677
• Plate 9678