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B. W. Holwerda, R. J. Allen (Space Telescope Science Institute), P. C. van der Kruit (Kapteyn Institute Groningen)
The ``synthetic field method" proposed by Gonzalez et al (1998) is used to determine the opacities in nearby spirals and irregulars using the number of background galaxies detected through the foreground galaxy. These numbers are then compared to those of simulations, the original data with an extincted HDF added. The aim of our current project is to automate this ``synthetic field method" and apply it to a large sample of archived HST data to determine the general distribution of cold dust in spiral and irregular galaxies. We present the first results of the automated method on HST data of the irregular galaxy Sextans A.