Stellar density profile, in the number of stars per arcmin² as function of the Galactic longitude. The black triangles show the density profile computed by Valenti et al. (2016) in their Fig. 4 at b = 0°. The red triangles represent the five fields we studied in this work. The inset shows a comparison between the spatial extent of both works. The hatched black square represents the innermost bin of Valenti et al. (2016), whereas the filled red rectangle is the area covered in this study. The right axis shows the star counts converted into stellar mass per arcmin² . The difference in the spatial coverage explains the marked difference in RC star density.