The Establishment of an Astrometric Standard Region – A Description of the Method with Reference to the Astrometric Standard Region in Praesepe (M44)

An astrometric standard catalog has been derived for the region centered on the Praesepe open star cluster. This catalog includes positions and proper motions of 408 objects on the system of the FK4 reduced from 9 catalogs and 145 plates from 15 different telescopes and spanning 110 years. The accuracy of the positions ranges from 0.01 to 0.15 arcsec and for the proper motions from 0.0002 to 0.004 arcsec/yr, depending on the number and quality of the observations. The method of catalog construction is an application of the central overlap technique.