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Appendix A: Conversion between dust opacity and extinction

In Eq. (3), we have provided a conversion between the frequency dependent dust opacity κ_d(ν) and the NIR extinction law (Cardelli et al. 1989) in order to be able to compare the behaviour of the scatter-free dust opacities of Ossenkopf & Henning (1994) and the extinction law at NIR wavelengths in Fig. 4. Below, we derive this equation in detail by starting from the relation between the extinction value and the optical depth at a given wavelength: Here, ρ is the density of the material that causes the extinction A_λ with its opacity κ_λ along the LoS path x. This can be written in terms of a surface density Σ_g,d that includes both dust and gas. Their properties are being disentangled as follows, where X_g,d is the gas-to-dust ratio, which is assumed to be 150 in this paper (Sodroski et al. 1997): At this point, we have come to a relation between the extinction A_λ and the dust opacity κ_d(ν) that depends on the column density of hydrogen atoms N_H. The conversion between the hydrogen and the mean gas mass is m_g/m_H = 1.36. When replacing the constants with the corresponding numbers, we get Expressed as a relation for κ_d(ν), we find In the NIR, the extinction law is insensitive to variations in R_V = A_V/E_B − V. Therefore, we can use Cardelli et al. (1989) to transform the ratios N_H/A_J (Vuong et al. 2003) and N_H/E_J − K (Martin et al. 2012) to hydrogen column density vs. NIR extinction ratios. If the N_H/A_V or N_H/E_B − V ratios are used instead, they implicitly introduce a dependence of R_V as follows: \newpageThe ratio A_λ/A_V as a function of R_V represents the extinction law of Cardelli et al. (1989). Several values for the ratio between the hydrogen column density and the colour excess E_B − V can be applied. If, for instance, the ratio of Bohlin et al. (1978) is used, we get For a more recent characterisation of that ratio (Ryter 1996; Güver & Özel 2009; Watson 2011), the numerical value in this conversion is modified by about 18%. To be able to convert the quoted ratio N_H/A_V to N_H/E_B − V, we have assumed R_V = 3.1 as the mean value for the diffuse ISM, and replaced the corresponding ratio in the equation above:

Appendix B: Spitzer IRS spectra

	Fig. B.1 Mid-infrared spectra at 11 positions across B68 obtained with the Spitzer IRS instrument. The most prominent spectral features are indicated by dashed lines. The flux density is given in mJy. The individual spectra are offset by 10 mJy each. There is no significant variation in the strength of the PAH features.
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Appendix C: CO spectra

	Fig. C.1 13CO (2–1) spectra extracted at two positions in the corresponding map. The upper spectrum shows a line on the western rim of B68 (RA (J2000) = , Dec (J2000) = −23°49′53′′), while the lower spectrum is taken at the location of the point source mentioned in Sect. 4.2. A Gaussian profile fit was applied to both spectra.
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Appendix D: Radial NIR extinction profiles

Fig. D.1 Radial profiles extracted from the extinction map of Alves et al. (2001a) (upper panel) and the newly calculated extinction map shown in Fig. 2 (lower panel). The small dots represent the data in the maps after regridding them to the same scale; the large dots are the mean values in bins of 20″ each with the error bars indicating the corresponding rms scatter. The mean distributions follow a profile fit similar to Eq. (15) (solid line). The power-law indices are α = 3.3 in the upper panel and α = 3.1 in the lower panel. For comparison, we added the profile of the BES (dashed line) given by Alves et al. (2001b).

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© ESO, 2012