VVVEXMAP-BULGE High resolution reddening map

Although recent infrared surveys have addressed this problem by providing extinction maps across the whole Galactic bulge area, dereddened color-magnitude diagrams near the plane and center appear systematically undercorrected, prompting the need for higher resolution.

These undercorrections affect any stellar study sensitive to color (e.g., star formation history analyses via color-magnitude diagram fitting), either making them inaccurate or limiting them to small and relatively stable extinction windows where this value is low and better constrained. This study is aimed at providing a high-resolution (2-arcmin to 10-arcsec) color excess map for the VVV bulge area in J-Ks color. We used the MW-BULGE-PSFPHOT catalogs, sampling 300deg^2^ across the Galactic bulge (|l|<10{deg} and -10{deg}<b<5{deg}) to isolate a sample of red clump and red giant branch stars, for which we calculated the average J-Ks color in a fine spatial grid in (l, b) space.