The detectability of open clusters in GaiaNIR #

This repo contains the source code for a project to determine the star cluster selection function of the proposed GaiaNIR astrometric mission. GaiaNIR would revolutionize Galactic astronomy with an incredibly high-accuracy and deep astrometric survey of the Milky Way, and is currently one of two options for the 8th L-class mission of the European Space Agency. This project wants to add more evidence about why it will be funded!

This repository and all source code is public for outreach & collaborative purposes. Please don't scoop the work here before then -- that would be pointless and rude 😠

Installation #

Use of uv to install project dependencies is strongly recommended. After installing uv (which is easy!), run

uv sync

in this directory to install all dependencies.

To use the code in practice, you will also need quite a lot of bits of data (atmosphere models, isochrones, and more). These can be downloaded automatically with the script fetch_data.py, which can be ran with

uv run fetch_data.py