Stellar properties and selection criteria. Left: Mean SDSS r-band magnitude in bins defined on the parallax S/N vs. parallax plane. Bins with no stars are shown in white. Right: 2D distribution of the number of stars in the r vs. ϖ plane. The cut at SNR_ϖ = 5 is shown with a dashed gray line in both panels. We note that the introduction of the parallax S/N cut imposes a biased selection in the r − ϖ plane. The data shown are for the large (30-arcmin radius) beam. We do not show the full dynamic range of ϖ and SNR_ϖ for better visualization of the key features of the dataset.