The radial abundance gradient of oxygen towards the Galactic anticentre
  We present deep optical spectroscopy of eight HII regions located in the
anticentre of the Milky Way. The spectra were obtained at the 10.4m GTC and
8.2m VLT. We determined Te([NII]) for all objects and Te([OIII]) for six of
them. We also included in our analysis an additional sample of 13 inner-disc
Galactic Hii regions from the literature that have excellent T_e
determinations. We adopted the same methodology and atomic dataset to determine
the physical conditions and ionic abundances for both samples. We also detected
the CII and OII optical recombination lines in Sh 2-100, which enables
determination of the abundance discrepancy factor for this object. We found
that the slopes of the radial oxygen gradients defined by the HII regions from
R_25 (= 11.5 kpc) to 17 kpc and those within R_25 are similar within the
uncertainties, indicating the absence of flattening in the radial oxygen
gradient in the outer Milky Way. In general, we found that the scatter of the
O/H ratios of Hii regions is not substantially larger than the observational
uncertainties. The largest possible local inhomogeneities of the oxygen
abundances are of the order of 0.1 dex. We also found positive radial gradients
in Te([O III]) and Te([N II]) across the Galactic disc. The shapes of these
temperature gradients are similar and also consistent with the absence of
flattening of the metallicity distribution in the outer Galactic disc.
