Hipparcos Input Catalogue, Version 2

This has resulted in a catalogue of stellar data including up-to-date information on positions, proper motions, magnitudes, colors, and when available, spectral types, radial velocities, multiplicity and variability information. The catalogue is complete to well-defined magnitude limits, and includes a substantial sampling of the most important stellar categories present in the solar neighbourhood beyond these limits.

The magnitude limits vary from 7.3 to 9 magnitudes as a function of galactic latitude and spectral type, and there are no stars fainter than about V = 13 mag. 118000 stars are included in the Hipparcos Input Catalogue, about half of them have been selected within well-defined limits in V magnitude, spectral type and galactic latitude (the "survey"), half of them within proposed observing programs. The mean accuracies achieved, as demonstrated by comparison with the Hipparcos results (Turon et al. 1995A&A...304...82T) are 0.3 arcsec for the positions and 0.25 mag for the Hp magnitude, with accuracies of 0.02 mag or better for more than a third of the catalogue.