Description
The astrometric ground-based observations of latitude / universal time variations, covering the interval 1899.7-2003.0, were used in combination with Hipparcos / Tycho positions and some older ground-based catalogs to construct a family of catalogs, tailored for long-term Earth rotation studies. These catalogs, called Earth Orientation Catalogs (EOC-1 through EOC-3) yielded more accurate proper motions than the original Hipparcos Catalogue, and its latest version, EOC-3, even periodic motions for a large portion of the stars. About 4.5 million observations made at 33 observatories are combined with the catalogs ARIHIP, TYCHO-2 etc... in order to obtain EOC-4. Spectral analysis of ground-based data and comparison with the USNO Sixth Catalog of Orbits of Visual Binary Stars are used to discover which of the observed objects display periodic motions, and improved combination procedures are used. The catalog contains 4418 different objects (i.e., stars, components of double stars, photocenters), out of which 599 have significant orbital motions.
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