Observational status of the USNO trigonometric parallax program

Since 1983, a TI 800×800 CCD has been routinely used on the 1.5-m astrometric reflector during dark time to measure parallaxes of faint (V16.0) stars. The rest of the time remains devoted to the fine grain (Kodak type IIIa emulsions) photographic parallax program, which now uses magnitude compensating filters to extend the range of the program to V=0. Sufficient data are now available to evaluate the precisions of these programs. For CCD fields, the mean error for the relative parallax ranges from ±0".0025 for fields with relatively few observations to ±0".0005 for intensively observed fields such as vB10. The photographic program is now producing relative parallaxes with average mean errors of ±0".0026 compared to ±0".0038 previously obtained with coarse grain emulsions.