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B.W. Holwerda (Space Telescope Science Institute / Kapteyn Institute), R.J. Allen (Space Telescope Science Institute), P.C. van der Kruit (Kapteyn Institute)
In the paper by Gonzalez et al (1998) the "synthetic field method" was proposed to measure the dust opacities in nearby spirals using the numbers and colours of the background galaxies. To find the opacities, HDF fields were added to the data at varying levels of extinction and the counts and colours of the background galaxies were compared with those of the original data. In this poster we present follow-up work and we describe our plans for a more comprehensive survey of dust opacities in spiral an irregular galaxies using an automated version of the method.