Top: image of the NB of the MW from the GLIMPSE360 survey (Whitney et al. 2011) from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The 4.5 μm image is shown in red and the 3.6 μm is shown in blue. The black line surrounding the dark shaded area indicates the footprint of our dataset, as shown in the bottom panel. The dotted gray line encompassing the white shaded area depicts the GNC survey area. Bottom: five HAWK-I pointings in K_S filter, covering the innermost part of the NB. Some relevant structures are indicated with arrows. The vertical white lines show the overlapping regions between the adjoint HAWK-I pointings.