The Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues are the primary products of the European Space Agency's astrometric mission, Hipparcos. The satellite, which operated for four years, returned high quality scientific data from November 1989 to March 1993. Each of the catalogues contains a large quantity of very high quality astrometric and photometric data. In addition there are associated annexes featuring variability and double/multiple star data, and solar system astrometric and photometric measurements. In the case of the Hipparcos Catalogue, the principal parts are provided in both printed and machine-readable form (on CDROM). In the case of the Tycho Catalogue, results are provided in machine-readable form only (on CDROM). Although in general only the final reduced and calibrated astrometric and photometric data are provided, some auxiliary files containing results from intermediate stages of the data processing, of relevance for the more-specialised user, have also been retained for publication. (Some, but not all, data files are available from the Centre de Donnees astronomiques de Strasbourg.) The global data analysis tasks, proceeding from nearly 1000 Gbit of raw satellite data to the final catalogues, was a lengthy and complex process, and was undertaken by the NDAC and FAST Consortia, together responsible for the production of the Hipparcos Catalogue, and the Tycho Consortium, responsible for the production of the Tycho Catalogue. A fourth scientific consortium, the INCA Consortium, was responsible for the construction of the Hipparcos observing programme, compiling the best-available data for the selected stars before launch into the Hipparcos Input Catalogue. The production of the Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues marks the formal end of the involvement in the mission by the European Space Agency and the four scientific consortia. For more complete and detailed information on the data, the user is advised to refer to Volume 1 ("Introduction and Guide to the Data", ESA SP-1200) of the printed Hipparcos and Tycho Catalogues. The user should also note that in order to convert the Double and Multiple Systems (Component solutions) data file hip_dm_c.dat into FITS format it is first necessary to filter the file according to whether the entry is a component record (identified by COMP in field DCM5) or a correlation record (identified by CORR in field DCM5) because of the different structures of the respective records. On a Unix system this can be achieved as follows: grep COMP hip_dm_c.dat > h_dm_com.dat grep CORR hip_dm_c.dat > h_dm_cor.dat The catalogue description file (this file) gives the relevant information for converting the main data files, including h_dm_cor.dat and h_dm_com.dat, into FITS format. The machine readable data files (i.e. those available on CD-ROM and the subset available from the CDS) contain several extra fields in addition to the data from the printed catalogue. These fields are identified by the letter `M' in the data label (e.g. the field DGM1 contains data only available in the machine readable file hip_dm_g.dat).