Probing the Galaxy I. The galactic structure towards the galactic pole

Observations of (B-V) colour distributions towards the galactic poles are compared with those obtained from synthetic colour-magnitude diagrams to determine the major constituents in the disc and spheroid. The disc is described with four stellar sub-populations: the young, intermediate, old, and thick disc populations, which have respectively scale heights of 100 pc, 250 pc, 0.5 kpc, and 1.0 kpc. The spheroid is described with stellar contributions from the bulge and halo. The bulge is not well constrained with the data analyzed in this study. A non-flattened power-law describes the observed distributions at fainter magnitudes better than a deprojected R^{1/4}-law. Details about the age, metallicity, and normalizations are listed in Table 1. The star counts and the colour distributions from the stars in the intermediate fields towards the galactic anti-centre are well described with the stellar populations mentioned above. Arguments are given that the actual solar offset is about 15 pc north from the galactic plane.