Astrometric observations of Nereid in 2006-2007

R. C. Qiao (1, 2) , X. Cheng (1) , K. X. Shen (1) , G. Dourneau (3, 4, 5) , S. H. Wang (1, 6) , X. Y. Hu (1) , Z. H. Tang (2, 6) , X. J. Xi (1)

1 National Time Service Center
2 United Laboratory for Optical Astrometry
3 L3AB - Laboratoire d'astrodynamique, d'astrophysique et d'aéronomie de bordeaux
4 OASU - Observatoire aquitain des sciences de l'univers
5 LAB - Laboratoire d'Astrophysique de Bordeaux [Pessac]
6 SHAO - Shanghai Astronomical Observatory [Shanghai]

In this paper, we present 112 new CCD astrometric positions of Nereid, the second and faint satellite of Neptune (mv ! 19). We observed this small satellite in the 2006-2007 period with the 1m and the 2.16m telescopes of Xinglong Station near Beijing, both equipped with large CCD detectors of 1340 × 1300 and 2048 × 2048 pixels, respectively. The high-density and highly accurate star catalogue UCAC2 (Zacharias, 2004) was used in the reduction so that a classical astrometric calibration method was applied. We have shown that our observations of Nereid appear to be of equal or higher precision (! ! 0.2”) than most of the recent CCD ones.

Mots clés: planets and satellites; satellites of Neptune; astrometry

Domaines: Cosmologie et astrophysique extra-galactique [astro-ph.CO]; Astrophysique [astro-ph]

R. C. Qiao, X. Cheng, K. X. Shen, G. Dourneau, S. H. Wang, et al.. Astrometric observations of Nereid in 2006-2007. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2008, 391, pp.1791-1795. ⟨hal-00332613⟩