In our previous work (Berdnikov 1987a) we derived the Cepheid
light-curve parameters only for photometric passbands UBVRI of
the Johnson system and reduced all observations taken in the
filters of the Cron-Cousins system to RI magnitudes.
However, in this version of the catalogue we give separate
light-curve parameters for
passbands because they are
now extensively used in the photometry of both galactic and
extragalactic Cepheids. We also dropped the U magnitude from
our catalogue because it is now not used in the Cepheid photometry.
We have published a catalogue of infrared (JHK) light-curve
parameters elsewhere (Berdnikov et al. 1996a).
To derive light-curve parameters in the
filters we
first selected for each Cepheid and filter the observations that
most accurately outlined the shape of the light curve. In most of
cases these were either our own observations or those of Gieren
(1981), Dean et al. (1977), Coulson & Caldwell (1985), Moffet &
Barnes (1984), and Pont et al. (1997) whose photometric systems
are virtually identical to our own. We then fitted the light curve,
either on the entire [0, 1] phase interval or on its
subintervals, by a Fourier series (with 3 to 25 terms), a spline,
or a second-to-third-order polynomial and joined the resulting
fragments to obtain the so-called master light curve. We then
used the linear least squares technique to reduce all other
observations to the photometric system of the master curve (a
detailed description of the algorithm can be found in Berdnikov
1992g) with subsequent refinement of the initial master curve
based on all available observations. We used the final master
curve to determine the principal parameters of the light-curves:
magnitude at maximum light, amplitude, and intensity-mean
magnitude.
Reduction of 
80 000 observations in our Cepheid data bank
(Berdnikov 1995) yielded reliable and accurate light curves for
455 Cepheids compared to 363 stars in the previous version of the
catalogue (Berdnikov 1987a).
Copyright The European Southern Observatory (ESO)