Introduction
In SAI OCL Catalog, we introduce our work on investigation of the Milky Way system of open star clusters.
The main goal of our study is a search for new clusters using huge surveys. 168 new clusters have been already discovered by us using J,H,Ks data from 2MASS point source catalog. Among them, 27 objects are embedded clusters, and we publish coordinates of their centers and diameters. For 141 new clusters, we found their physical parameters using J,H,Ks data from 2MASS catalog and, for a number of clusters, our UBVRI CCD observational magnitudes. Also, we study known clusters and derive their distances, color-excesses and ages using the same data.
New method developed by Koposov et al. (2008) is applied to fit isochrones on color-magnitude diagrams and to find cluster's parameters. In this method, the position of the isochrone on a CMD plot depends on how the stars lying along this isochrone are distributed over the radial-density plot.
Applying the same technique to the homogeneous data we built the list of homogeneous parameters of open clusters.