Skip to content

ALFALFA Spectra

Jump to bottom
Karen Masters edited this page Oct 9, 2026 · 3 revisions

Access ALFALFA Spectra in NED

This is a short tutorial on How to Access the Spectral Data of ALFALFA objects from NED on ALFALFA Objects

Find all ALFALFA data in NED

  1. Go to: NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database).

  2. On the menu, “Search Objects” → “In Refcode”, as shown below. You will be directed to a new page, which has a blank to fill in the Refcode. The refcode of ALFALFA is 2018ApJ...861...49H, after typing in, click go (or press enter on keyboard).

How to search the Refcode

Accessing Spectra for a Specific ALFALFA Galaxy

  1. On the menu, “Search Objects” → “By Name”, as shown below. You will be directed to a new page, which has a blank to fill in the Object Name.

Example Named Object Search

  1. Enter a galaxy name that is within The ALFALFA Extragalactic HI Source Catalog, e.g. NGC7769.
  2. After clicking on “Go” (or Enter on the Keyboard), the search results will appear. Click on “Spectra” to access the data.

Example ALFALFA Spectra in NED

The reference code for your galaxy is given under “Reference”, this can be used in the above steps to find further information.

ALFALFA Spectra in Sciserver

The ALFALFA spectra (and grids and catalogs) are available to access and work with in the Sciserver online platform which provides an online environment for server-side analysis of big data sets.

Users will need a free Sciserver account, then can access the ALFALFA dataset by creating a Compute Container on SciServer with the ALFALFA data volume attached. A Compute container is an online area in which Jupyter Notebooks (or other code) can be run to interact locally with the data, and also provides file system access to download data cubes, spectra and catalogs.

There is example code to work with in the notebooks folder of this repository.

Clone this wiki locally