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Session 7 - Gas and Dust in the ISM.
Display session, Monday, June 10
Great Hall,
The local distribution of visually-absorbing interstellar material has been studied over the years by many authors, yet few attempts have been made to synthesize and directly compare results of these studies. This has been in part due to the different presentation styles employed: many results have been presented graphically, analytically, or as contour plots. Few of these have been presented in the form of computer code.
Modern computing techniques allow many of these obstacle to be overcome. We present here preliminary results of a FORTRAN computer program (Hakkila et al. 1996, submitted; to be made available electronically) for calculating visual interstellar extinction and its error given inputs of Galactic longitude, Galactic latitude, and distance. The code represents a synthesis of a number of published studies, and can be used both for making corrections to individual observations and to statistical samples.
