ESA's Gaia space astrometry mission is performing an all-sky survey of
stellar objects. At the beginning of the nominal mission in July 2014, an
operation scheme was adopted that enabled Gaia to routinely acquire
observations of all stars brighter than the original limit of G~6, i.e. the
naked-eye stars. Here, we describe the current status and extent of those
observations and their on-ground processing. We present an overview of the data
products generated for G<6 stars and the potential scientific applications.
Finally, we discuss how the Gaia survey could be enhanced by further exploiting
the techniques we developed.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures. Submitted for the proceedings of the 2016 SPIE
Astronomical Instrumentation and Telescopes conference (SPIE 9904
