Lifting the Dusty Veil With Near- and Mid-Infrared Photometry: I.
  Description and Applications of the Rayleigh-Jeans Color Excess Method
  The Milky Way (MW) remains a primary laboratory for understanding the
structure and evolution of spiral galaxies, but typically we are denied clear
views of MW stellar populations at low Galactic latitudes because of extinction
by interstellar dust. However, the combination of 2MASS near-infrared (NIR) and
Spitzer-IRAC mid-infrared (MIR) photometry enables a powerful method for
determining the line of sight reddening to any star: the sampled wavelengths
lie in the Rayleigh-Jeans part of the spectral energy distribution of most
stars, where, to first order, all stars have essentially the same intrinsic
color. Thus, changes in stellar NIR-MIR colors due to interstellar reddening
are readily apparent, and (under an assumed extinction law) the observed colors
and magnitudes of stars can be easily and accurately restored to their
intrinsic values, greatly increasing their usefulness for Galactic structure
studies. In this paper we explore this "Rayleigh-Jeans Color Excess" (RJCE)
method and demonstrate that use of even a simple variant of the RJCE method
based on a single reference color, (H-[4.5um]), can rather accurately remove
dust effects from previously uninterpretable 2MASS color-magnitude diagrams of
stars in fields along the heavily reddened Galactic mid-plane, with results far
superior to those derived from application of other dereddening methods. We
also show that "total" Galactic midplane extinction looks rather different from
that predicted using 100um emission maps from the IRAS/ISSA and COBE/DIRBE
instruments as presented by Schlegel et al. Instead, the Galactic mid-plane
extinction strongly resembles the distribution of 13-CO (J=1->0) emission.
Future papers will focus on refining the RJCE method and applying the technique
to understand better not only dust and its distribution, but the distribution
of stars intermixed with the dust in the low-latitude Galaxy.
