CCD POSITIONS OF SATURN AND ITS MAJOR SATELLITES FROM 2002-2006

Abstract

This paper presents 2154 precise positions of Saturn and its major satellites from 359 CCD exposures taken with the 1 m telescope at the Yunnan Observatory during the years 2002-2006. It also describes the improved image-processing techniques for the pixel positional measurement of Saturn's rings and its major satellites, especially for Mimas and Enceladus. The four bright satellites S3-S6 (i.e., Tethys, Dione, Rhea, and Titan) of Saturn are used to calibrate the CCD field of view by comparing their pixel positions with their theoretical ones from the theory TASS1.7. The observational positions of these major satellites, when measured with respect to Rhea, usually have a good agreement with their theoretical ones except for Mimas, which has the biggest systematic difference of about -0.3 arcsec in R.A. in its 2002 observational data sets. However, these differences of Mimas become much smaller when the recent Jet Propulsion Laboratory ephemeris is replaced. The rms errors in each coordinate are about 40 mas for Saturn and its bright satellites S2-S6, and 90 mas for Mimas. These positional observations are comparable to the best ground-based CCD observations.