A collection of code and data used for my final year project as part of the assessment in the UCD Physics with Astronomy and Space Science BSc. Supervisor: Dr. Antonio Martin-Carillo, School of Physics, University College Dublin
Open clusters have been long used as stellar laboratories, and galactic tracers. In this study both are used in tandem to investigate the distribution of old (> 1000 Myr) open clusters in a milky way. BV photometric data were collected for Berkeley 28, Bochum 2, NGC 2124 and NGC 2155. Each cluster’s population was determined using Gaia data and parameterised using MIST and DSEP isochrones, along with classification based on the Trumpler scheme and cataloguing of the stellar population. These clusters were combined with 266 open clusters from newly available catalogues to perform galactic tracing. It was found that there is an underabundance of old open clusters within the inner galactic disk of the Milky Way despite production outweighing disruptive dynamical forces in the galaxy. It is also shown that there is no direct correlation between cluster age and galactic position. This would indicate the sprawling embedment of older clusters throughout the milky way is due to a layered relationship between internal cluster dynamics and the disk environment. It is deemed that an underabundance of old clusters is due to dispersion as a result of destructive interactions and misrepresentation due to observational selection, with the old breed of open clusters found to be gradually inflating the galactic disk.