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M.F. Skrutskie (University of Virginia), T.J. Reber, N.W. Murphy (Amherst College), M.D. Weinberg (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
We present a reconstructed view of the Milky Way disk using 40,000 carbon star candidates extracted from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). These candidates can be selected with high reliability using a technique which distinguishes the intrinsically red colors of carbon stars (and other extreme AGB) from reddened stars in the Galactic plane using 2MASS photometry alone. The extracted sources serve as crude standard candles with a dispersion of ~0.3 mag. The complete stellar bar and the far edge of the Galactic disk are evident in this analysis. We further infer parameters for the central bar and for disk scale lengths and scale heights using this population.