the telescope response; consideration of spatially varying absorption across the field due to molecular clouds; application of a realistic source detection method including threshold effects due to position-dependent point spread functions and X-ray background. The current version of the simulations omits contributions from accretion binary systems and will thereby underestimate the population at high $MedE$ for fields close to the Galactic Center.

The results of the simulations are applied to the CCCP X-ray survey of the Carina star forming complex [@Townsley11a] to evaluate the levels of non-Carina contaminants among the $>14000$ CCCP point sources. The simulations predict that about 2500 AGNs (§\[contaminants\_agn\_section\]), 1800 foreground stars, and 900 background stars (§\[contaminants\_stellar\_section\]) will be detected. The simulated contaminants are expected to have uniform spatial distributions and exhibit significant differences in their distributions of the X-ray median energy and $J$-band magnitude (§ \[contamination\_properties\_section\]). These properties are thus useful for classifying individual CCCP sources as likely Carina members or contaminants [@Broos11b].

Comparing properties of the simulated contaminating sources and the CCCP sources, at a simplistic level (§\[qualitative\_analysis\_section\]), we find that the number of hard CCCP sources evenly distributed across the field is in satisfactory agreement with our extragalactic contamination prediction, but the number of 