VIRAC: The VVV Infrared Astrometric Catalogue
  We present VIRAC version 1, a near-infrared proper motion and parallax
catalogue of the VISTA VVV survey for 312,587,642 unique sources averaged
across all overlapping pawprint and tile images covering 560 deg$^2$ of the
bulge of the Milky Way and southern disk. The catalogue includes 119 million
high quality proper motion measurements, of which 47 million have statistical
uncertainties below 1 mas yr$^{-1}$. In the 11$<K_s<$14 magnitude range the
high quality motions have a median uncertainty of 0.67 mas yr$^{-1}$. The
catalogue also includes 6,935 sources with quality-controlled 5 $\sigma$
parallaxes with a median uncertainty of 1.1 mas. The parallaxes show reasonable
agreement with the TYCHO-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS), though caution is
advised for data with modest significance. The SQL database housing the data is
made available via the web. We give example applications for studies of
Galactic structure, nearby objects (low mass stars and brown dwarfs, subdwarfs,
white dwarfs) and kinematic distance measurements of YSOs. Nearby objects
discovered include LTT 7251 B, an L7 benchmark companion to a G dwarf with over
20 published elemental abundances, a bright L sub-dwarf, VVV 1256-6202, with
extremely blue colours and nine new members of the 25 pc sample. We also
demonstrate why this catalogue remains useful in the era of Gaia. Future
versions will be based on profile fitting photometry, use the Gaia absolute
reference frame and incorporate the longer time baseline of the VVV extended
survey (VVVX).
