Mutual positions of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter from photometric observations during their mutual occultations and eclipses in 1997

Abstract

We report the final results of the 1997 campaign of photometric observations of the mutual phenomena of the Galilean satellites carried out at observatories in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. Our results contribute substantially to the world data bank of such observations and will allow the model of the motion of Galilean satellites to be further refined. To facilitate the use of photometric data, we reduced them by computing the planetocentric rectangular coordinate differences of satellite pairs for a number of instants of time so we deduce the differences for one instant from one observed light curve. It is these reduced data that constitute the principal result of this work. We based our data reduction on the method which we developed in earlier papers (Emel'yanov 1999; Emel'yanov 2000). The accuracy of observations was estimated in the process of reduction. The paper also describes the equipment used.