WIDE-FIELD SEARCH FOR NEARBY FAINT STARS

A project to search for nearby stars in a wide field using Schmidt pla tes is presented. A field intensively observed allowed us to select a list of nearby stars candidates. CCD astrometry of 20 of these, acquir ed at the 1.23m telescope of Calar Alto is presented. Trigonometric pa rallaxes and proper motions have been determined. We confirm for six o f our targets that they are nearby stars with distances smaller than 4 0 parsecs from the Sun (smaller than 20 parsecs for three of them) and with relative errors smaller than 20 percent. One of these appears to be a bright (V = 15.8) large proper motions star (mu > 0.'' 4) not me ntioned in the NLTT catalog and absent from CDS data base.