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 star-forming regions (SFRs) providing the necessary data with which to derive, for example, ages/distances/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.
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 the published paper for how they fared).
I have recently completed work on a homogeneous photometric survey of 13 young SFRs ranging in age from ~ 1 - 30Myr. 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. The full photometric catalogue (as well as a pre-MS members catalogue) for each SFR in the survey is now available on the Cluster Collaboration homepage here.