Cluster Collaboration

The Cluster Collaboration consists of teams within the Exeter Astrophysics Group led by Tim Naylor and Keele Astrophysics Group led by Rob Jeffries. The collaboration has created a series of photometric catalogues of young clusters and associations providing the necessary data with which to derive, for example, ages, distances and mass functions for young stellar populations. More information on how these catalogues were created and the format in which they are presented can be found at the Cluster Collaboration homepage.

Isochrone server

The semi-empirical pre-MS model isochrones which we have created using the observed colours of young cluster members are now available via an isochrone server which you can find on the Cluster Collaboration homepage here (further details can be found in Bell et al. 2014). Our aim in making these models available is to allow others to measure cluster ages from the pre-MS which are consistent with those we presented in Bell et al. (2013). Give it a go and feel free to contact either myself or Tim Naylor if you have any problems.

Photometric catalogues

During my Ph.D. I worked closely with other members of the collaboration, namely Nathan Mayne (also at the University of Exeter) and Stuart Littlefair (University of Sheffield). My contribution to this series of catalogues includes a deep photometric survey of the Pleiades (more information can be found here). This provided an ideal testbed catalogue with which to scrutinise current sets of theoretical pre-main-sequence (pre-MS) evolutionary models (see Bell et al. 2012 for how they fared).

I have recently completed work on a homogeneous photometric survey of 13 young clusters ranging in age from ~ 1-30 Myr. This survey provides a consistent set of photometric observations with which to further test pre-MS evolutionary models, and will hopefully become the fiducial dataset for theorists with which to evaluate their revised models. If you would like to use the photometric data, for whatever reason, the full photometric catalogue (as well as the pre-MS member catalogue) for each cluster in the survey is now available on the Cluster Collaboration homepage here.