Special Plates

A few plates were drilled with all science bundles and half of the flux-calibration mini-bundles targeting blank sky. 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 at different airmass 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. These two plates are exact repeats of one another, but note that there are additional galaxies with multiple observations.

• 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. They are:

• Plate 8479
• Plate 8480
• Plate 8587
• 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. These plates are:

• Plates 9673-9675
• Plates 10141-10150
• Plates 10480-10491
• Plates 12027-12050

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, and the relevant plates are:

• Plate 9677
• Plate 9678

For a small set of plates, we took many more exposure sets to reach 300-400% of the nominal survey depth. These data are useful for testing S/N effects on our data analysis. The following is our list of "deep" plates:

• Plate 8078
• Plate 8133
• Plate 8141
• Plate 8147
• Plate 8149
• Plate 8625
• Plate 8940
• Plate 8942

We took dithered observations of a few globular clusters for the globular cluster ancillary program. One or two fiber bundles on these plates target the cores of clusters. The other bundles target individual stars in or around the clusters. In the bulge fields (Plate 11986, 11987), some bundles are placed around the cluster to obtain light from the bulge background, others are placed in very dusty, dark nebular patches to try to get better background sky measurements.

• Plate 11841: NGC4147
• Plate 11842: NGC5634
• Plate 11843: NGC6229
• Plate 11986: NGC6316
• Plate 11987: NGC6522 and NGC6528
• Plate 12187: NGC7078
• Plate 12767: NGC6341