This paper lists over 1200 observations of the major satellites of Saturn made during the apparitions of 1990-94 using CCD detectors on the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope. As far as we are aware, these are the only such observations which have been obtained during the period, and they are therefore a valuable resource to anyone wishing to investigate the orbits of the satellites.
The relative ease with which such high-precision observations can be obtained demonstrates the value of CCD astrometry applied to the satellites of the major planets. In particular, the use of the satellites themselves to calibrate the scale and orientation of the CCD further simplifies the reduction of the observations. However, additional work needs to be done in order to validate this technique, since it is possible that it may act to perpetuate the scale errors that are known to exist in the semi-major axes of the orbits derived from pre-1966 visual observations.
Acknowledgements
The Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope is operated on the island of La Palma by the Royal Greenwich Observatory in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. The authors wish to thank the staff of the observatory for their kind assistance. We also thank Dr R.A. Jacobson of JPL for carrying out an independent analysis of the residuals of the observations and helping to identify a small number of inconsistencies in the original data set. We are grateful to the referee, Dr Gérard Dourneau, for helpful and constructive criticism of the original version of this paper. This work was carried out with financial support from the U.K. Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council; one of the authors (CDM) wishes to thank the PPARC for the award of an Advanced Fellowship. S.C. Greaves is funded by a PPARC research studentship.