New Astrometric Reduction of the USNO Photographic Plates of Planetary Satellites
Abstract
An international collaboration has been set up between the US Naval Observatory (USNO) in Washington DC, the IMCCE of Paris Observatory (OBSPM) and the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB) to make a new astrometric reduction of the USNO archival photographic plates of planetary satellites. In order to obtain a better knowledge of their orbital motions these photographic plates are digitized with the new generation DAMIAN digitizer at the ROB, providing a geometric stability of better than 0.1 micrometer on the plates. We focus here on a subset of a few hundred photographic plates of the Galilean satellites, taken with the McCormick and the USNO 26-inch refractors between 1967 and 1998. Specific procedures and algorithms are used to obtain highly accurate positions using the Tycho2, UCAC2 (20 - 30 mas) and later the UCAC3 (10 - 20 mas) catalogues. A comparison with the MAMA digitizer of the Paris Observatory is made through the results obtained from digital mosaic images of the plates.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2009
- Accession Number
- ADA511617
Entities
People
- Dan Pascu
- Georges De Decker
- Jean-eudes Arlot
- Jean-pierre De Cuyper
- Lars Winter
- Norbert Zacharias
- Valery Lainey
- Vincent Robert