The Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE)

We present the first data release of the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE), an ambitious spectroscopic survey to measure radial velocities and stellar atmosphere parameters (temperature, metallicity, and surface gravity) of up to one million stars using the Six Degree Field multiobject spectrograph on the 1.2 m UK Schmidt Telescope of the Anglo-Australian Observatory. The RAVE program started in 2003, obtaining medium-resolution spectra (median R = 7500) in the Ca-triplet region (8410-8795 angstrom) for southern hemisphere stars drawn from the Tycho-2 and SuperCOSMOS catalogs, in the magnitude range 9