Top-down schematic view of the line-of-sight positions of the 50 and 20 km/s clouds and the ridge, inferred from the self-consistent NSD model of Sormani et al. (2022) and the μ_l versus H - K_s relation explained in Sect. 3.3. This plot assumes that the position of the clouds and the ridge is that at which their μ_l values are 3 σ different from that of the control field. The x- and y-axis scales differ to optimise the visualisation of the relative distances. The positions of Sgr A^* and the circumnuclear disc (CND) are also shown. The dotted black line marks the scale length of the NSD (e.g. Gallego-Cano et al. 2020; Sormani et al. 2022).