3D plots of the Solar Neighborhood

Two are cross-eye stereograms, two are animations.

The plot of all stars within 25 parsecs was created from the RECONS 25 pc sample as it existed in January, 2012. Stars are colored by V-K color, and sized by how far from a rough main sequence they are (the giants are, in fact, giant).  These plots were made with a custom IDL 3D plotter.

The young stars plots are stars in known nearby young associations (less than 100 Myr old) from Zuckerman & Song (2004,2011), Torres et al. (2006,2008), Lopez-Santiago et al. (2006), Malo et al. (2013), Shkolnik et al. (2009, 2012), Rodriguez et al. (2011,2013), Riedel et al. (2011,2014), and many other sources.  Items are colored as follows:

eps Cha & eta Cha: Magenta

beta Pic: Blue

TW Hya: Yellow

Octans: Light blue

Tuc-Hor: Red

Columba: Orange-red

Carina: Purple-red

Argus: Green

IC 2391 Supercluster: Light Green

AB Dor: Orange

Pleiades: Orange

Ursa Major: Pink

Hercules-Lyra: Light Magenta

 

The flickering gray points are all stars with known parallaxes, to better demonstrate the relative density of field stars on the same scale.  Because only measured trigonometric parallaxes have been used, there are many more objects in both sets than are displayed here.  The flickering seems to be an artifact of Matplotlib 1.3's plotting routines.