We have mapped the central 10′ \times 10′ of the dense core TMC-1C at 450 , 850 and 1200 µm using SCUBA on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and MAMBO on the IRAM 30m telescope .
We show that although one can , in principle , use images at these wavelengths to map the emissivity spectral index , temperature and column density independently , noise and calibration errors would have to be less than \sim 2 % to accurately derive these three quantities from a set of three emission maps .
Because our data are not this free of errors , we use our emission maps to fit the dust temperature and column density assuming a constant value of the emissivity spectral index and explore the effects of noise on the derived physical parameters .
We find that the derived extinction values for TMC-1C are large for a starless core ( \sim 80 mag A _ { V } ) , and the derived temperatures are low ( \sim 6 K ) in the densest regions of the core , using our derived value of \beta = 1.8 .