Galactic distribution of all ATLASGAL filaments for which a distance has been determined. The orange shaded area indicates the region of the Galactic plane covered by the ATLASGAL survey to a distance of 20 kpc, within which the survey is complete for compact clumps with masses >1000 M_⊙. The background image is a schematic of the Galactic disk as viewed from the Northern Galactic Pole (courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech)). The Sun is located at the apex of the wedge and is indicated by the ⊙ symbol. The smaller of the two cyan dot-dashed circles represent the locus of tangent points, while the larger circle traces the Solar Circle. The spiral arms are labelled in white and Galactic quadrants are given by the roman numerals in the corners of the image. The yellow lines shows the innermost region towards the Galactic centre where distances are not reliable.