Abstract

Young open clusters are fruitful astrophysical laboratories because their members possess a common age, composition and distance. Combining information from clusters at different ages offers a powerful tool to understand the early evolution of stellar and planetary systems. Significant advances have been made in this area during recent years. I will begin by presenting successful efforts to detect transiting planets in young open clusters with Kepler/K2, before highlighting some of the interesting serendipitous discoveries made during this work. I will then present the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS), highlight some of our recently-discovered planets, and introduce our new clusters program, which is already providing novel insight into early stellar and planetary system evolution.