21 cm HI line. This cold atomic hydrogen appears to be associated with molecular gas [@li2003; @goldsmith2005], but the limited sampling of Shuter et al. does not reveal much about its morphology. The far–infrared emission from Taurus has been studied by [@abergel1995], who also compared it to moderate resolution maps of  J = 1$\rightarrow$0 emission. The dust column density distribution has been examined by [@padoan2002] and does bear a quite close resemblance to the integrated intensity of and thus to the column density of gas in relatively high extinction regions.

We discuss the observations and data reduction procedure in §\[observations\]. Derivation of the column density in the different portions of the maps is presented in §\[coldens\], in which we also discuss the distribution of column density and mass in the region. We present a brief discussion of the large–scale gas kinematics in §\[kinematics\]. We address the relationship of the molecular material and the magnetic field in §\[magnetic\], and discuss the relationship of the gas and the young stars in the region in §\[youngstars\]. We discuss some of the interesting features of the morphology of the gas in §\[morphology\]. We summarize our results in §\[summary\].

OBSERVATIONS
============

The observations were taken 