Celestia Forums

I wanted to make an open cluster as a backdrop for a system I'm working on for Orions Arm, specifically being IC 4756. For the time being, I was wondering if there was a utility that could generate random open clusters somewhere online.

I intend to make the whole cluster properly, once I can find information on the cluster's individual components (hoping that it isn't too large), but I wanted something for the time being.

For that matter, would this cluster be included with that multi-million star database?

...John...

I trust you're aware of the Open Cluster database at http://www.univie.ac.at/webda//navigation.html

One problem in general is that the catalogs tend to be almost complete for a relatively small area in each cluster. As a result if you try to plot all of the cataloged stars you'll get what looks like a square cluster because the outlying stars aren't included. The square is the area of the "sensor" within which star positions were measured, usually a photographic plate or CCD.

I don't know if the 2Million database includes enough stars in that area to be useful.

Hmm... I might hold off on this, then, for the time being. There are other, in-system items that I should give more attention to.

Thanks, Selden!

...John...

I don't know if the 2Million database includes enough stars in that area to be useful

.

When I made a cluster from the Simbad data (NGC 6633) I found that a lot of the stars in the cluster were present in the 2 million star database or even in the basic Celestia stars.dat, but they were almost all at the wrong distance.
So I just made duplicates of those stars at the approriate distance (with a bit of a random distribution around the mean distance of the cluster). If that means there are more than one version of certain stars I am afraid that is inevitable; I believe that there are a number of duplicate stars in the 2Million star database elsewhere as well.