Puck satellite Earth-based observations

¹ Observatório Nacional, Rua General José Cristino 77, 20921-400 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil e-mail: cave@on.br
² Service d'Aéronomie du CNRS, BP 3, 91371 Verrières-le-Buisson Cedex, France

Received: 7 February 2006
Accepted: 24 March 2006

Abstract

Puck, a faint satellite very close to Uranus' planet, was discovered by Voyager 2 Spacecraft images in 1986. Ever since then, few observations from Earth have been made. This prompted us to start a program of systematic observations of this satellite with the 1.6 m telescope at the Laboratório Nacional de Astrofísica/MCT (Itajubá, Brazil). The success of the observations is mainly due to the use of a Coronagraph developed at Observatório Nacional/MCT (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). This article presents astrometric positions obtained from Earth observations of Puck and of the five major Uranian satellites for four nights in 2004. Those positions are compared to the theoretically calculated positions from JPL Development Ephemeris. For Puck, the root mean square (rms) of the mean residual was found to be 84 milliarcseconds (). The stars' USNO-A2.0 catalog was used as a reference system for the astrometric calibration.