Astrometric observations of Nereid in 2006-2007

Abstract

In this paper, we present 112 new CCD astrometric positions of Nereid, the second and faint satellite of Neptune (mv ≃ 19). We observed this small satellite in the 2006-2007 period with the 1 and 2.16-m telescopes of Xinglong Station near Beijing, both equipped with large CCD detectors of 1340 × 1300 and 2080 × 2048 pixels, respectively. The high density and highly accurate star catalogue UCAC2 was used in the reduction so that a classical astrometric calibration method was applied. We have shown that our observations of Nereid appear to be of equal or higher precision (σ ≃ 0.2 arcsec) than most of the recent CCD ones. © 2008 RAS.