2003/03/31 by Piotr Popowski, Kem H. Cook, Kem Cook +2 · 7 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/379291
24 pages, 3 tables, 7 figures (6 in color), version accepted to AJ, added comparisons with Schlegel et al. (1998) and Dutra et al. (2003) reddening maps
arxiv created 2003/09/09 · openalex publication_date 2003/12/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
We present a ( V - R )-based reddening map of about 43 deg 2 of the Galactic bulge/bar. The map is constructed using template image photometry from the MACHO microlensing survey, contains 9717 resolution elements, and is based on V - R color averages of the entire color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) in 4' × 4' tiles. The conversion from the observed color to the reddening follows from an assumption that CMDs of all bulge fields would look similar in the absence of extinction. Consequently, the difference in observed color between various fields originates from varying contribution of the disk extinction summed along different lines of sight. We check that our V - R colors correlate very well with infrared and optical reddening maps. We show that a dusty disk obeying a csc | b | extinction law, E ( V - R ) = 0.0274 csc | b |, provides a good approximation to the extinction toward the MACHO bulge/bar fields.