The point set for star10m consists of locations of the nearest 10,000,000 stars in the Gaia DR2 instance of the TSP. This relatively small subset of Gaia DR2 has a ball-like appearance. But, as you can see in the images below, the points are definitely not uniformly distributed. That's good. Gives the TSP instance a bit of character.
The TSPLIB file containing the xyz triples weighs in at 433 MByte. If you would like to have access to the data, please send an email to bico@uwaterloo.ca and I'll place it temporarily on the web site.
To create an instance of the TSP, we need to specify precisely the point-to-point distances we use. For this, we adopt the standard TSPLIB norm for 3D Euclidean data. This norm takes the straight-line distance between two points and rounds the resulting value to the nearest integer. In our case, the star-to-star distance is therefore measured to the nearest 1/10th parsec. Here is a simplified version of the computer code used in Concorde for the distance calculation.
Warning: These interactive pages load a 120 mbyte file.
Stars -- Zoom, pan, and rotate the data set to see its 3D structure. Stars are represented by twinkling points.
Light -- In this version, stars are represented as square particles, resulting in an image that is easier to render (in case you have trouble with the twinkling version).
