Mutual Events of the Uranian Satellites Observed with the Faulkes Telescopes

Details Mutual Events of the Uranian Satellites Observed with the Faulkes Telescopes Mutual Events of the Uranian Satellites Observed with the Faulkes Telescopes

Sep 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008dps....40.4601c&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #40, #46.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 40, p.480

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The 2007 Uranian Equinox allowed unique observations of the planet, its rings and satellites, possible only twice during the planet's 84 year orbit.
Among these were mutual eclipses and occultations between the 5 classical satellites Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, Oberon and Miranda. These ``mutual'' events are extremely useful as reality checks of satellite ephemerides. In addition, they provide an opportunity to improve our knowledge of the satellite orbits and the system constants.
We observed several mutual events in 2007 using the 2m Faulkes Telescopes North (FTN) and South (FTS) located in Haleakala, Maui and Siding Spring, Australia respectively, operated by the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT) network. To mitigate against Uranus' glare, we utilized wide-band imaging in the near-IR, a small image scale and a posteriori subtraction of the planet's PSF.
We obtained positive detections of six mutual events, three occultations and three eclipses, among these satellites. Three of these events involved Miranda, a difficult target due to its proximity to Uranus. Furthermore, we recorded at least two events that were predicted to occur with high confidence but did not, in fact, occur.
During this presentation we will describe our observing strategy, operational setup and data reduction techniques and present examples of obtained lightcurves. Our observational results have been compared with predictions based on ephemerides by Laskar and Jacobson (1987; GUST86), by Lainey and Arlot (2006; LA06) and by Rush and Jacobson (2007; RJ07). Offsets with respect to the Voyager-era GUST86 are quite significant, of the order of minutes in the event midtimes. Smaller, yet significant trends in the data also appear with respect to LA06 and RJ07.
We will discuss the nature of these trends and how they can be interpreted in terms of potential improvements in our knowledge of the Uranian system.

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