The Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues (Tycho-1) are the primary products of the European Space Agency's astrometric mission, Hipparcos. The satellite, which operated for four years, returned high quality scientific data from November 1989 to March 1993.
The Hipparcos catalogue lists a little more than 118,000 stars with 1 to 3 milliarcsec level astrometry, while the Tycho catalogue lists a little more than 1,050,000 stars. The Hipparcos catalogue is complete to magnitude 7.3. [1]
The catalogues contain a large quantity of very high quality astrometric and photometric data. In addition there are associated annexes featuring variability and double/multiple star data, and solar system astrometric and photometric measurements. The principal parts are provided in both printed and machine-readable form.
The global data analysis tasks, proceeding from nearly 1000 Gbit of raw satellite data to the final catalogues, was a lengthy and complex process, and was undertaken by the NDAC and FAST Consortia, together responsible for the production of the Hipparcos Catalogue. A fourth scientific consortium, the INCA Consortium, was responsible for the construction of the Hipparcos observing programme, compiling the best-available data for the selected stars before launch into the Hipparcos Input Catalogue. The production of the Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues marks the formal end of the involvement in the mission by the European Space Agency and the four scientific consortia. Later, the Tycho catalogue observational data was re-analysed to produce the more accurate Tycho-2 Catalogue.