The Local Interstellar Medium in the Direction of the Galactic Anticentre

High resolution observations of interstellar Na Iabsorptions in the spectra of early-type stars in the second Galacticquadrant have been used to derive the spatial distribution of thenearby interstellar gas in the Galactic anticentre hemisphere. The datashow the presence, within the region explored and within the nearest150 pc, of eight diffuse interstellar clouds with LSR velocities in therange 15–55 km s-1. Molecular gas previously identified close tothe Sun by Trapero et al. (1995) and Trapero et al. (1996) is embeddedin one of the clouds. The motion of these clouds does not reflect anymotion of the gas away from the Scorpio-Centaurus association, showingthat the kinematics observed in the neighbourhood of the Sun byLallement and Bertin (1992) is restricted, in the second Galactic quadrant,to the nearest ∼ 50 pc.