Abstract
We report on the development of an extinction map for the Southern Galactic disk based on the combination of Near-Infrared (NIR) observations of the ESO public survey VISTA Variables in the Milky Way (VVV), complemented with GLIMPSE and 2MASS data. The 520 deg{^2} observed by VVV in 5 near infrared bands (J, H, K_{s}, Y, Z), and multiple epochs, are a wealth of information which are important to address fundamental questions about the structure and formation history of the Milky Way. The region surveyed by this work, the 152 VVV tiles/fields of the Southern Galactic disk, overlaps with the 2MASS and GLIMPSE surveys, and thus allows the sources surveyed to have multiband photometry ranging from the near to mid-infrared wavelengths. Our results, using the Rayleigh-Jeans Color Excess method (RJCE), have allowed us to obtain an extinction map with a pixel size of 1'×1', which is consistent with other maps developed recently. Furthermore, our results show a systematic underestimation of extinction by previous work based on 2MASS NIR data alone.
