Positions and Proper Motions - South

Its main purpose is to provide a convenient, dense and accurate net of astrometric reference stars on the southern celestial hemisphere. This net is designed to represent as closely as possible the new IAU (1976) coordinate system on the sky, as defined by the FK5 star catalogue (Fricke et al., 1988).

In other words, it is a representation of this system at higher star densities and fainter magnitudes. PPM South is the southern-hemisphere complement to the PPM Star Catalogue (Roeser and Bastian, 1991), which covers the northern hemisphere, plus a strip between the equator and about -2.5 degrees declination. At the border line a continuous transition between the northern and southern part was tailored in such a way that no overlap, nor gaps, nor double entries occurred.