Description
We determine accurate positions of the main satellites of Uranus: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon. Positions of Uranus, as derived from those of these satellites, are also determined. The observational period spans from 1992 to 2011. All runs were made at the Pico dos Dias Observatory, Brazil. We used the software called Platform for Reduction of Astronomical Images Automatically (PRAIA) to perform a digital coronography to minimise the influence of the scattered light of Uranus on the astrometric measurements and to determine accurate positions of the main satellites. The positions of Uranus were then indirectly determined by computing the mean differences between the observed and ephemeris positions of these satellites. A series of numerical filters was applied to filter out spurious data. These filters are mostly based on (a) the comparison between the positions of Oberon with those of the other satellites and on (b) the offsets as given by the differences between the observed and ephemeris positions of all satellites. We have, for the overall offsets of the five satellites, -29mas (+/-63mas) in right ascension and -27mas (+/-46mas) in declination. For the overall difference between the offsets of Oberon and those of the other satellites, we have +3mas (+/-30mas) in right ascension and -2mas (+/-28mas) in declination. Ephemeris positions for the satellites were determined from DE432+ura111.
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