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We generalize the technique of Lada et al. (1994) to map dust column densitythrough a molecular cloud (NICE) to an optimized multi-band technique (NICER)that can be applied to any multi-band survey of molecular clouds. We present afirst application to a ~625 deg^2 subset of the Two Micron All Sky Survey(2MASS) data and show that when compared to NICE, the optimized NICER technique(i) achieves the same extinction peak values, (ii) improves the noise varianceof the map by a factor of 2 and (iii) is able to reach 3 \sigma dust extinctionmeasurements as low as A_V = 0.5 magnitudes, better than or equivalent toclassical optical star count techniques and below the threshold column densityfor the formation of CO, the brightest H2 tracer in radio-spectroscopytechniques. The application of the NICER techniques to near-infrared dataobtained with a 8 meter-class telescope with a state-of-the-art NIR camera,such as the VLT-ISAAC combination, will be able to achieve dynamic ranges frombelow 10^21 protons cm^-2 to over 10^23 protons cm^-2 (A_V in the range [0.3,60]) and spatial resolutions < 10'', making use of a single and straightforwardcolumn density tracer, extinction by interstellar dust.

Mapping the interstellar dust with near-infrared observations: An optimized multi-band technique