1 Introduction

Our observations of Saturnian satellites belong to a program of systematic astrometric observations of the satellites of Jovian planets initiated in 1982 in Brazil. The results of the 138 photographic plates of the Saturnian large satellites carried out in the period 1982 to 1988 were published in Veiga & Vieira Martins (1999). For those observations the residuals give rise to a standard deviation smaller than 0 $\hbox{$.\!\!^{\prime\prime}$ }$3. Moreover 22 photographic positions of Helene with the same standard deviation where published in Veiga & Vieira Martins (2000). Also, many CCD observations made in 1995 when the Earth and the Sun crossed the plane of the Saturnian satellites were astrometrically reduced and published in Vienne et al. (2001a), here after (VTVAM). There, we presented 6006 differential positions of the eight largest satellites with dispersion smaller than 0 $\hbox{$.\!\!^{\prime\prime}$ }$15. The positions of Tethys, Dione, Rea and Titan were used to define a reference system in every frame.

In the past years some others observations of the Saturnian satellites were published, including the accurate positions presented in Peng et al. (2002). A review of the published observations and their comparison with different ephemerides can be found in Vienne (2001).

In this paper the observation of 493 CCD frames carried out during 27 nights, distributed in 10 missions in 1995-1999, are presented. The zenith distances of the planet were in general small because the telescope latitude ($-23^\circ$) was close to the declination of the planet. Since the number of reference stars is very small in almost all frames, the inter-satellite reduction method as presented in (VTVAM) was used.

This paper is organized as follows: in Sect. 2 we present the observations, measurements and reduction; in Sect. 3 the observed positions are presented and compared with the calculated ones. The conclusions are presented in Sect. 4.