Proper motions of stars in the field of open clusters are fundamental to segregate their members. The common origin of the stars of a cluster suggests that they present a common motion, and the information on proper motion and radial velocity can be used in this identification task.
The knowledge of the members of the clusters is essential for different studies: photometric investigations (Pinsonneault 1998), studies of internal motions and dynamics of the stars in the clusters (Perryman et al. 1998), determination of the IMF (Sanner et al. 2001) and of the luminosity function (Belikov et al. 2000).
On the other hand, the mean proper motions can be useful in the study of Galactic orbits and in Galactic structure investigations (Lynga & Palous 1987).
The aim of this work is to determine the absolute proper motion of the clusters using a large number of stars for each one.
In Paper I we determined the absolute proper motion of 112 open clusters situated within 1 kpc from the Sun (Dias et al. 2001). In this second paper, the objective was to determine the absolute proper motions of all the catalogued clusters farther than 1 kpc.
The results are incorporated in a new version of open clusters catalogue (Dias et al. 2002, hereinafter DAML2002) that presents the fundamental parameters and kinematic data for 1537 objects.
In Sect. 2 we describe the method and the procedures adopted in this investigation. Section 3 presents the main results and their comparison with those given in the literature.
Copyright ESO 2002