Precise CCD positions of Galilean satellite-pairs

Abstract

In this paper, we present 526 precise CCD positions of Galilean satellite-pairs of Jupiter, which have been extracted from 441 CCD frames captured by a 1-m telescope at the Yunnan Observatory from 2002 to 2010. The four Galilean satellites (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto) are used to calibrate the CCD field of view by comparing their pixel positions with their theoretical positions computed from two modern ephemerides of the Galilean satellites, L2 and JUP230, which have been developed by the Institut de Mechanique Celeste et de Calcul des Ephemerides and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, respectively. In this paper, we focus on the relative position of a pair of satellites with short separation (less than 85 arcsec) for good internal precision. The mean (O − C) (observed minus computed) values of all these satellite-pairs in right ascension and declination are found to be no larger than 6 mas and 2 mas, respectively, for each ephemeris. The estimated precision for one single observation is better than 30 mas in each direction.