1 Introduction

Molecular clouds are commonly thought to be the birth place of stars. The exact link between the mass of a star and the structure of the parent molecular cloud is not fully understood yet. It is therefore necessary to study molecular clouds in different galactic environments and with different degrees of gravitational binding to figure out possible differences which influence the formation of stars.

High latitude molecular clouds (HLCs) or galactic cirrus clouds are a class of molecular clouds where the conditions are not well suited to form stars. Their kinematics is largely dominated by turbulence and self-gravity plays only a minor role in their dynamics (Magnani et al. [1985]; de Vries et al. [1987]; Heithausen [1996]). Detailed structural analysis of these clouds in comparison to those where the conditions for star-formation are more favourable will shed light on the star-forming process. Two further conditions make HLCs ideal targets for such a study: i) they are close to the Sun, and thus can be observed at high linear resolution even with small telescopes and ii) at their location at high galactic latitudes there is less confusion with fore- or background gas than there is close to the galactic plane.

In this paper we present a detailed study of MBM32 (Magnani et al. [1985]) which is located at $l=147^\circ, b=40^\circ$in the complex of cirrus clouds known as the Ursa Major cirrus clouds (de Vries et al. [1987]). MBM32 harbours a dense core first detected in formaldehyde (Heithausen et al. [1987]) and ammonia (Mebold et al. [1987]). Based on a multi-transition CO and NH₃ study, Schreiber et al. ([1993]) derived a kinetic temperature of 24⁺¹⁰_-5 K and were able to model 7 different CO transitions with a beam averaged (4') H₂ column density of about 2 10²⁰cm^-2 and a power law density distribution.

Over the last years we have continued to map MBM32 in several CO transitions. These observations are presented in Sects. 2 and 3. Possible variations of the line ratios will help reveal the structure and properties of this cloud. To trace the atomic gas of this cloud we have also obtained a complete map in the 21cm H I line at 9 $.\mkern-4mu^\prime$2 resolution. In conjunction with corresponding IRAS maps we analyse the distibutions of atomic and molecular gas (Sect. 4). A distance towards MBM 32 (from e.g. star counts) has not yet been determined. Throughout this paper we shall assume a distance to MBM 32 of 100 pc.