All-sky near-infrared extinction map

Extinction can be estimated using the reddening of the light of background stars. Several methods exist (e.g., NICE, NICER, NICEST, GNICER) to combine observations of several NIR bands into extinction maps.

We present a new method of estimating extinction based on NIR multiband observations and examine its performance. Our basic method uses a discretised version of the distribution of intrinsic stellar colours directly. The extinction of individual stars and the average over a resolution element are estimated with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods.