The Orion, Monoceros R2, Rosette, and Canis Major star forming regions

Post date: Sep 25, 2012 10:00:55 PM

We converted 19 million stars from the 2MASS database into NICER and NICEST extinction maps of Orion, Monoceros R2, Rosette, and Canis Major star forming regions, with mean errors of the order of 0.03 mag in Ak. This is an incredible map of an incredible region of the Galaxy, the closest massive star formation region to Earth. Among other things we derived distances via a Galactic model, which are in amazing good agreement with the distances derived in the literature, validating the technique to other more distant regions.