Comparison of two different extinction laws with HIPPARCOS observations

Abstract

Interstellar absorption in the galactic plane is highly variable from one direction to another. In this paper colour excesses and distances from a new open cluster sample are used to investigate the spatial distribution of the interstellar extinction. An inverse method (Tarantola & Valette, 1982) is used to construct the extinction map in the galactic plane below |b| < 10(o) . The A_v (r,l) diagrams are compared with those derived from individual stars (Arenou et al. 1992, Neckel & Klare 1980). An analytic expression for the interstellar extinction as a function of galactic longitude and distance in the solar neighborhood is given. The comparison of the model predictions with Hipparcos observations in the 4-dimensional space of (V, B-V, H_v, r) shows that our extinction model provides a better fit to the data. However, a new and more detailed extinction model is still lacking. Based in part on observations made with the ESA Hipparcos astrometry satellite