A Preliminary Study on The Improvement of Proper Motions For HipparcosStars by Using Photographic Plates

Extract

The 3435 photographic plates, which were obtained by using the 40cm astrograph at Zô-Sè station of Shanghai Observatory during 1901-1993, have been accumulated for observing open clusters, extragalatic nebulas, radio stars and variable stars etc. These plates cover 764 unoverlapping regions (2°.3 * 1°.7) on the sky. Most of the plates distribute along the ecliptic, about 10 000 Hipparcos stars, 27 000 PPM stars and 500 FK5 stars are included in these regions. Among these plates, there are 2718 plates having two observing epochs, and they cover 359 different regions; there are 142 and 92 regions where the intervals of two epochs are about 50 and 70 years, and the numbers of plates in these regions are about1494 and 1023 respectively. About 372 plates were photographed before 1949,which play an important action for improvement of proper motions of Hipparcos stars. Four methods used to improve the proper motions for Hipparcos stars were designed. If the 2718 plates mentioned above having two epochs were used for improvement of the proper motions of Hipparcos stars, the stellar number of 299, 1378, 377 and 1664 corresponding to the four methods will be obtained with final precision 0.7 mas/yr. If supplementary observations are made in 1997, the stellar number of 494, 2431, 1534 and 2899 will be obtained with the same precision.