This page is constructed to provide extinction maps of dark clouds to astronomers in the world. The extinction maps based on the Digitized Sky Survey I are available since December 2005. Additional extinction maps based on the 2MASS Point Source Catalog (2MASS PSC) are released since April 2010. You can select regions to see and download by coordinates and cloud names. Enjoy!
On 2011 July 22nd, we renewed all of the color excess and extinction maps based on the 2MASS PSC. If you have downloaded our maps of AJ, AH, AKs, E(J-H), and E(H-Ks) previously, we recommend you to download the new maps that can be obtained in the same way as before. Other maps, such as the noise levels, resolution, number of stars used, etc. are the same as before.
The old extinction and color excess maps suffer from a large-scale background problem due to ambiguity in determining the background star colors (see Sec. 5 in Dobashi et al. 2011, PASJ, Vol. 63 SP1, pp.S1-S362). An error arising from this problem is rather large toward the inner region of the Galaxy (-90 < galactic longitude < 90 deg). The problem has been improved in the new maps by comparing the 2MASS PSC with a simulated star catalog based on the Besancon model (Robin et al. 2003, A&A, 409, 523). The simulated star catalog was kindly provided by Dr. Douglas Marshall (France). For details, please see our paper (Dobashi et al. 2013, PASJ, 65, id 31).
English version only. The explanation of the data is fully presented in a separate publication (Dobashi et al. 2005).
Since: 2005 December 24th
Go!Core No. 3868 is a cloud in M33, but it used to be assigned a wrong flag (only 0). We assigned a proper flag (0 and 8), and renewed the catalog.
2011.JUL.22
we renewed all of the color excess and extinction maps based on the 2MASS PSC.
"Atlas and Catalog of Dark Clouds Based on 2MASS" by K. Dobashi has been published in a special issue of PASJ (Dobashi, K. 2011, PASJ, Vol.63 SP1, pp.S1-S362).
Atlas and Catalog of Dark Clouds Based on DSS I (ver.2.1.1) were released.
We release the first version of the atlas and catalog of dark clouds derived by using the optical database Digitized Sky Survey I (DSS).
English version only. This page is tentatively open since April 2010, and still has to be improved.
Since: 2010 April 7th
Go!Please see "Dobashi, K. et al. 2005, PASJ, vol.57 SP1, pp.S1-S386" for the DSS maps.
Please see "Dobashi, K. 2011, PASJ, vol.63 SP1, pp.S1-S362" for the 2MASS maps.
Please see "Dobashi, K. et al. 2013, PASJ, vol.65, id 31" for the 2MASS maps.
Copyright of the text and FITS data on this web site entirely belongs to Tokyo Gakugei University.
However, the data can be used by anyone for astronomical research and education purpose.
This website is financially supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Nos. JP17H02863, JP17H01118, JP17K00963, JP16K12749, 178059, 188065, 198049, 208040, 218044, 228037, 248028, 258031, 26350186, 15HP8026, and 16HP8023) of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS).
Please read the following documents for details of data on this web site.
Download the file (pdf)