1 Introduction

In this work, we introduce a new catalogue of the open clusters of our Galaxy. Open clusters have long been recognized as important tools to investigate the kinematics of star formation regions, aspects of Galactic structure such as the location of spiral arms, Galactic dynamics, or even the chemical abundance gradients in the disk.

With the publication of the Hipparcos Catalogue (ESA 1997) and its sub-products, the Tycho (ESA 1997) and Tycho2 (Høg et al. 2000) catalogues, and with individual work using CCDs for photometry and/or astrometry, we have seen a large growth of the available data on open clusters in a short time.

Among the recent results, we note the discovery of new open clusters by different authors: Platais et al. (1998) discovered 12 new objects using Hipparcos data, Chereul et al. (1999) discovered 3 new probable loose open clusters, and Dutra & Bica (2001) discovered 42 objects at infra-red wavelengths using the 2MASS survey. Important contributions were given by Baumgardt et al. (2000) and Dias et al. (2001, 2002) who determined the mean proper motions of more than a hundred clusters, using the Hipparcos and Tycho2 catalogues, respectively. Dias et al. (2001, 2002) also computed the membership probabilities of the stars in the cluster fields. Other recent results are the determination of the fundamental parameters of 423 clusters by Loktin et al. (2000) and the discussion of the problem of the differences in the distances obtained with parallaxes and by photometric main sequence fitting (see Pinsonneault et al. 1998, and references therein). The latest publications on open clusters are divulged in the SCYON electronic newsletter hosted by the University of Heidelberg in parallel with the WEBDA database.

Most of the basic data, as well as other results, are included in the WEBDA database (Mermilliod 1995), which is the most complete open cluster database presently available. The WEBDA database includes not only the data contained in the Lyngå (1987) catalogue, which is also a basic reference much used in the literature, but also provides a huge amount of additional information. Most of this information is, however, presented in separate files, available individually for each cluster. Also, the database is not updated with recently discovered clusters and new designations proposed in the literature (as discussed in next section). Therefore, the main reasons that prompted us to prepare a new catalogue, instead of simply adding newly discovered objects, were the need to have the relevant information in a single file, for ease of use, and more important, the fact that the previous catalogues do not provide the open clusters' proper motions and radial velocities in a systematic way.

In this work, we inserted the available information on open clusters' fundamental parameters, kinematics and metalicity in a single file. We believe that this list will be an important tool for all types of research on open clusters. Section 2 describes the contents of the catalogue and the main reference sources. In Sect. 3 we comment on the new data included.