@inproceedings{b632995e9314444ab07836be93e81c7a,
title = "Mapping the Interstellar Dust with Near-Infrared Observations: An Optimized Multi-Band Technique",
abstract = "We generalize Lada et al. (1994) NICE technique to map dust column density through a molecular cloud to an optimized multi-band technique that can be applied to any multi-band survey of molecular clouds. We present a first application to a ˜ 625 deg^2 subset of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) data and show that when compared to NICE, the optimized NICER (i) achieves the same extinction peak values, (ii) improves the noise variance of the map by a factor of 2 and (iii) is able to reach 3 σ dust extinction measurements as low as A_V ˜eq 0.5 magnitudes, better than or equivalent to classical optical star count techniques and below the threshold column density for the formation of CO.",
author = "Marco Lombardi and Jo{\~a}o Alves",
year = "2002",
doi = "10.1007/10856518_2",
language = "English",
isbn = "978-3-540-43541-9",
series = "ESO Astrophysics Symposia",
publisher = "Springer-Verlag Berlin-Heidelberg",
pages = "21--28",
editor = "Alves, {Jo{\~a}o F. } and McCaughrean, {Mark J. }",
booktitle = "The Origin of Stars and Planets: The VLT View",
}