I appreciate your participation chris - tho I find your comment a little bit useless.

the reason why I´d like to use the verts for rendering is because I have a model now representig the (exact) coordinates of about 9000 stars with its vertices' position. in addition the verts are colored to match the apparent brightness of the stars at night.

unless you have an idea how to pointConstrain particles to the objects vertices and color each particle refering to the vertexcolor I think I stick to my plan.

nevertheless - thx for your reply

dan