How Do I Know If MaNGA Has Observed My Galaxy?

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Finding your galaxy in the drpall summary file

The current MaNGA drpall file contains all the galaxies observed by MaNGA and included in this data release (DR13). If you know the Right Ascension (RA) and Declination (DEC) of your galaxy and want to check, whether this galaxy is included in the MaNGA DR13, then you can check this with IDL in the following way (Python examples of accessing the drpall file can be found here):

dpf=mrdfits('drpall-v1_5_4.fits',1,hdr)

Now dpf is an IDL structure of the drpall file. Assuming for the moment that your galaxy has RA = 229.52558 deg and declination DEC = 42.745842 deg, you can see if there is a galaxy near this position.

ii=where(abs(dpf.objra-229.52558) lt 0.001 and abs(dpf.objdec-42.745842) lt 0.001)
print,dpf[ii].mangaid  ;should print 12-193481

If you know the MaNGA id or the plate and ifu design of your galaxy, similar procedure can be followed:

ii=where(dpf.mangaid eq '12-193481')
jj=where(dpf.plate eq 7443 and dpf.ifudsgn eq '12703')

Here ii and jj would be the indices for your given galaxy. A value of -1 means no galaxy was found.

MaNGA footprint

The current MaNGA observing footprint is given on the Footprint page. There are also instructions on this page for extracting the list of observed plates using Python.

For a projected field-lay out of future MaNGA observations, visit the Field Layout Forecast page.