Ground-based Imaging Of Pluto's Satellites, Hydra And Nix.

Details Ground-based Imaging Of Pluto's Satellites, Hydra And Nix. Ground-based Imaging Of Pluto's Satellites, Hydra And Nix.

Sep 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.3109f&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #31.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.542

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We report astrometric and photometric observations of Hydra and Nix, the small satellites of Pluto recently discovered with the HST/ACS (Weaver et al. 2005). We observed the Pluto system on UT 2006 June 27, UT 2006 June 28 and UT 2006 July 5 with the Inamori Magellan Areal Camera (IMACS) on the 6.5-m Magellan Baade telescope and on UT 2006 July 23 with the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Magellan Instant Camera (MagIC) on the 6.5-m Magellan Clay telescope. We obtained roughly 1800 sec of integration on each of the four nights in a series of exposures that were short enough to avoid saturating Pluto (10 sec to 2 minutes, depending upon the instrument and observing conditions). The typical FWHM of the PSF on each of these nights was 0.45 arcsec, 0.5 arcsec, 1.0 arcsec and 0.7 arcsec, respectively. To identify Hydra and Nyx, we used the IRAF/DAOPHOT routines (Stetson 1992) to determine the stellar PSF on each image and then subtract the flux from Pluto and Charon, at their measured positions, as well as the flux from nearby stars. We shifted the subtracted images in software to compensate for the apparent motion of the Pluto system and then averaged the resulting images. We detected Hydra and Nix on most of these nights. We believe these are the first reported ground-based detections of these moons. These observations open the opportunity for regular, repeated measurements, with the goal of detecting the mutual interactions between Hydra and Nix in order to solve for their individual masses, as recently suggested by Lee et al. (2006).

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