  We discuss the possibility of mapping interstellar clouds at unprecedentedly
high spatial resolution by means of near-IR imaging of their scattered light.
We calculate the scattering of the interstellar radiation field by a cloud
model obtained from the simulation of a supersonic turbulent flow. Synthetic
maps of scattered light are computed in the J, H and K bands and are found to
allow an accurate estimate of column density, in the range of visual extinction
between 1 and 20 magnitudes. We provide a formalism to convert the intensity of
scattered light at these near-IR bands into a total gas column density. We also
show that this new method of mapping interstellar clouds is within the
capability of existing near-IR facilities, which can achieve a spatial
resolution of up to ~ 0.1 arcsec. This opens new perspectives in the study of
interstellar dust and gas structure on very small scales. The validity of the
method has been recently demonstrated by the extraordinary images of the
Perseus region obtained by Foster & Goodman (2005), which motivated this
investigation.
