Tokyo Photoelectric Meridian Circle


The Tokyo Photoelectric Meridian Circle is a meridian circle that observes and records the positions of stars and planets, which are then reported in the PMC catalogs.

Meridian circle

The Tokyo Photoelectric Meridian Circle is a fully automated photoelectric meridian circle at the Mitaka campus of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo, Japan. It was manufactured by Carl Zeiss Oberkochen, Germany, and installed in Mitaka in 1982. The telescope is equipped with a double-slit photoelectric micrometer, a photomultiplier with a photon counting device, and a set of filters.
Systematic observations with the PMC began in December 1985 for about 33,000 stars selected from several source catalogs. The results of the observations were divided into sequential groups according to the observation years and reduced into a corresponding annual catalog. Each annual catalog contains the positions of several thousand stars. All of the annual catalogs published up to 1993 are available on request in machine-readable form, either directly from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan or from the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg.

List of catalogs

The PMC catalogs are astronomical catalogs which report the results of observations made with
the Tokyo Photoelectric Meridian Circle.