Meeting the cool neighbors. VII. Spectroscopy of faint red NLTT dwarfs

We present low-resolution optical spectroscopy and BVRI photometry of 453 candidate nearby stars drawn from the NLTT proper-motion catalog. The stars were selected based on optical/near-infrared colors, derived by combining the NLTT photographic data with photometry from the 2MASS Second Incremental Data Release. Based on the derived photometric and spectroscopic parallaxes, we identify 111 stars as lying within 20 pc of the Sun, including nine stars with formal distance estimates of less than 10 pc. A further 53 stars have distance estimates within 1 sigma of our 20 pc limit. Almost all of those stars are additions to the nearby-star census. In total, our NLTT-based survey has so far identified 496 stars likely to be within 20 pc, of which 195 are additions to nearby-star catalogs. Most of the newly identified nearby stars have spectral types between M4 and M8.