High Angular Resolution Stellar Imaging with Occultations from the Cassini Spacecraft I: Observational Technique

Abstract

We present novel observations utilising the Cassini spacecraft to conduct an observing campaign for stellar astronomy from a vantage point in the outer solar system. By exploiting occultation events in which Mira passed behind the Saturnian ring plane as viewed by Cassini, parametric imaging data were recovered spanning the near-infrared. From this, spatial information at extremely high angular resolution was recovered enabling a study of the stellar atmospheric extension across a spectral bandpass spanning the 1 - 5 μm spectral region in the near-infrared. The resulting measurements of the angular diameter of Mira were found to be consistent with existing observations of its variation in size with wavelength. The present study illustrates the validity of the technique; more detailed exploration of the stellar physics obtained by this novel experiment will be the subject of forthcoming papers.

9 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Milliarcsecond angular resolution of reddened stellar sources in the vicinity of the Galactic Center. II. Additional observations
• A catalog of near-IR sources found unresolved with milliarcsecond resolution

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• High Angular Resolution Stellar Imaging with Occultations from the Cassini Spacecraft II: Kronocyclic Tomography
• Lunar occultations with Aqueye+ and Iqueye
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