Tokyo Photoelectric Meridian Circle

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

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.

All of the annual catalogues 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 (CDS).