Observational data showing highly excited H₂ lines in HH7. Top two panels: spectra of a 06 × 09 area of HH7 in two narrow wavelength intervals, each containing a line of H₂ from a quasi-bound energy level and one adjacent line, from Fig. 6 of P16. Vertical dashed lines are the line wavelengths calculated as described in Sect. 3. Bottom: spectral images of the four lines shown above, extracted from the NIFS data cube. The field of view is 25 × 25 and corresponds to the left part of Fig. 2 of P16; the field centre corresponds to RA = 3:29:08.42, Dec = +31:15:27:45 (J2000), with an estimated uncertainty of 025.