Bureau des longitudes
From 1992 to 1999, the satellites of Saturn may be eclipsed by the shadow of the planet. During 1995 and 1996, the satellites may occult or eclipse themselves thanks to the small planetocentric declination of the Earth and the Sun. Such events are very rare (they occur only every 15 years) and a special effort was made in order to observe as many events as possible in spite of their weakness and of the brightness of Saturn and its rings.
At the present time, we succeeded to observe 19 eclipses by the planet Saturn, 22 mutual occultations involving satellites 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6, and 53 mutual eclipses involving the all eight main satellites.
A preliminary analysis has shown that the times of the observations differ from the predicted times of the events from 10 to 20 seconds of time. We have now to search from the origin of these differences: it may come either from the reduction or from the theory of the motion, which both could be improved.