The point set for star250k consists of the locations of the nearest 250,000 stars in the Gaia DR1 instance of the TSP. The xyz triples of coordinates are listed in the following gzipped file.
• star250k.tsp.gz, the coordinates in TSPLIB format.
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.
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).