New astrometric observations of Triton in 2007–2009★

Abstract

Astrometric positions of the Neptunian satellite Triton with a visual magnitude of 13.5 were obtained during three successive oppositions in 2007, 2008 and 2009. A total of 1095 new observed positions of Triton were collected during 46 nights of observations, involving eight missions and three telescopes. We compared our observations to the best ephemerides of Triton available now. This comparison has shown that our observations present a high level of accuracy as they provide standard deviations of residuals hardly higher than 50 mas and mean residuals lower than 30 mas, corresponding to about only 500 km in the position of the very distant satellite Triton. Moreover, we have compared most of the different planetary ephemerides of Neptune available now as well as two recent orbit models of Triton. These new comparisons have clearly shown the differences between all of these ephemerides which can be significant and that are presented in this work.