The TOPP is an ongoing program to determine precise parallaxs for nearby stars. It began in 11/1994 with a CCD on the 1.05m telescope of the Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino (OATo) and continues today on a better CCD and has also grown to included infrared programs on the 3.5 Telescope Nazionale di Galileo, the 3.5m of Calar Alto and an optical program on the Liverpool Robotic Telescope.

A typical parallactic movement over five years of a nearby White Dwarf N1-441 observed with the Astromed CCD of the OATo Telescope for Astrometry and Photometry.

The main scientific goals are the characterization of the faint end of the main sequence and GSC2 discovered high proper motion white dwarfs. Indeed the extension of the original program to larger telescopes was insipred by the recent L and T dwarf discoveries. The programs on the different telescopes now compliment each other giving complate coverage for red stars from I=10 (~V=12) magnitudes to J=17 (V~24).

The permanent Torino team consists of Richard Smart, Mario Lattanzi, Giuseppe Massone and Beatrice Bucciarelli with contributions from many other staff of the Observatory.