Distribution of the sample stars in the solar neighbourhood. Upper panel: galactic plane projection, the Galactic centre lies in direction of the bottom of the panel. Lower panel: rotational plane projection, the Northern Galactic Pole lies in direction of the top of the panel. The sample stars that are analysed quantitatively here are marked by dots, open boxes mark candidate SB2 systems and open circles stars that were excluded from the analysis because of other peculiarities. Numbers/letters correspond to those of our internal numbering in the tables. Error bars are of spectroscopic distances (stars 1–20, see Table 5) and of measured parallaxes (objects A–G). The position of the Sun is marked by  ⊙ .