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Up: CCD astrometry

1. Introduction

In an earlier paper (Beurle et al. 1993), we reported on our use of a CCD camera on the 1-metre Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope (JKT) on La Palma to obtain astrometric observations of the major satellites of Saturn during a seven-day period in July 1991. These observations yielded root-mean-square (RMS) residuals of tex2html_wrap_inline1073 when compared with the orbits of Harper & Taylor (1993, 1994), demonstrating that CCDs can achieve results equal to photographic plates for this type of astrometry.

As a result of the success of the 1991 observing campaign, further sets of observations were made with the JKT in 1993 and 1994 using a CCD with twice the field of view of the CCD used in previous years. This enabled us to include both Iapetus and Phoebe in our observing programme and also to investigate new methods for astrometric calibration of the CCD.

In this paper, we publish all of our measurements of the positions of the eight major satellites made during observing campaigns in 1990, 1991, 1993 and 1994.



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