Any interest in a command-line cluster generator?

[selden]

Yup. I just verified it. The most recent catalog at WebDA for NGC 6611
claimed to be from
Guarcello M.G., Prisinzano L., Micela G., Damiani F., Peres G., Sciortino S.
(2007) Astron. Astrophys. 462, 245
Correlation between the spatial distribution of circumstellar disks and massive stars in the open cluster NGC 6611. Compiled catalog and cluster parameters
2007A&A...462..245G

is nicely square, although it seems to have some interesting structure near the center.

[selden]

Here's a revised display of the catalog. Stars with Vmag (AppMag) or Stellar Types available at WebDA have had those values set. The other stars had their AppMag and StellarTypes set to 16 (slightly dimmer than the dimmest cataloged) and M5. I arbitrarily decreased all their AppMags by 5 so Celestia would show them. All are placed at a distance of 7000 LY. Getting plausible individual distances would be another project.

For reference, I've included Nebula images from my ancient M16 addon.

Hipparcos stars in the region -- nebula alignment looks OK


NGC 6611 stars from WebDA


(Is anyone interested in this combination as an Addon?)

[t00fri]

Selden,

apparently you switched implicily from globular clusters (initially in this thread) to open galactic clusters (e.g. NGC 6611). I was referring throughout to globular clusters and the quality of scientific data about them. The dynamics of open clusters is quite distinct from that of globular clusters. Unlike open clusters, the latter are frequently considered to be the "nuclei of cannibalized dwarf galaxies".

There is a vivid scientific activity about this "Globular -Clusters -- Dwarf galaxy connection"
See e.g. http://www.astro.lsa.umich.edu/~ognedin/dwarf/

I am still very interested in attempting a scientific-level visualization of open galactic clusters.

Fridger

[selden]

Fridger,

I think the confusion arises because I use the word "cluster" to mean both globular and open clusters.
McLuster can generate both.

At any rate....
MCL2STC v1.0 is now available.

http://www.lepp.cornell.edu/~seb/celest ... cl2stc.zip
1.5MB, expands to about 4MB.

The programs mcluster_sse and mcl2stc are a small fraction of the size. Most of the space is occupied by the Cygwin runtime system. It should run under Windows 7 x64, which is where I developed it. It'll probably run under XP or Vista, but I don't know for sure. The source code will have to be built from scratch on computers running other operating systems.

mcluster_sse can be used to generate a variety of open or globular clusters.
mcl2stc translates the output of mcluster_sse into stc format for use with Celestia.

Please read the included mcl2stc_readme.txt for usage information.