THE ASTRONOMICAL JOURNAL    VOLUME 110, NUMBER 4, PAGE 1838        OCTOBER 1995

             THE PALOMAR/MSU NEARBY-STAR SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY. I.
             THE NORTHERN M DWARFS - BANDSTRENGTHS AND KINEMATICS

                                 I. NEILL REID

       Palomar Observatory, 105-24, California Institute of Technology,
                          Pasadena, California 91125
                    Electronic mail: inr@astro.caltech.edu

                               SUZANNE L. HAWLEY

        Department of Physics and Astronomy, Michigan State University,
                         East Lansing, Michigan 48824
                    Electronic mail: slh@pillan.pa.msu.edu

                                 JOHN E. GIZIS

       Palomar Observatory, 105-24, California Institute of Technology,
                          Pasadena, California 91125
                   Electronic mail: jeg@astro.caltech.edu

                                   ABSTRACT

    The Third Catalogue of Nearby Stars (Gliese & Jahreiss Preliminary
    Version of the third Catalogue of Nearby Stars, 1991) includes over
    1850 stars which lie north of Dec. = -30 deg and are either identified
    as spectral type M, or are unclassified but with an absolute visual
    magnitude estimate M_V > +8.0.  Although there is no uniformity in
    selection criteria, and many of the stars lack basic data (radial
    velocities, spectral types, accurate photometry), the observational
    properties of these stars underlie most estimates of the fundamental
    characteristics of the Galactic Disk.  We have obtained optical
    spectroscopy of 1746 of the 1876 stars -- the remaining 130 are binary
    companions of brighter stars and inaccessible to our observations.
    These spectra allow us, first, to exclude 61 stars as either
    degenerates or as misclassified earlier-type (B-K) stars lying beyond
    the 25 pc limit; to establish radial velocities accurate to +/- 10 km/s
    for all stars confirmed as late-type dwarfs; to determine spectral
    types and absolute magnitudes from the TiO bandstrength, allowing more
    accurate distance estimates for stars with inaccurate (or no)
    trigonometric parallax measurements; and to identify stars with Halpha
    emission (chromospherically active stars) and with strong CaH
    absorption (perhaps including some metal-poor disk subdwarfs).  We have
    determined the nearby-star luminosity function from complete samples
    derived by applying both the distance limits defined by Wielen (1974)
    and by using limits derived from our own analysis.  In both cases, we
    find good agreement with Wielen's results to M_V ~ +11, but lower
    densities at the maximum (M_V ~ +12).  The latter analysis results in a
    luminosity function, Phi(CNS), which closely matches photometric
    parallax analyses for M_V < +11 and M_V > +14 -- we do not recover the
    apparent excess of low-luminosity stars inferred from analysis of the
    5 pc sample.  However, Phi(CNS) does lie below Phi(phot) at the peak
    (M_V ~ 12), and we suggest that this offset is caused by the inclusion
    of unrecognized binaries in the photometric surveys.  We have also
    reanalyzed the local stellar kinematics using the complete sample and
    find that the velocity distributions show significant departures from
    single Gaussian velocity dispersions.