Analysis of ground-based observations of the satellites of Saturn 1874-1988

We have analysed over 40000 ground-based observations of the major satellites of Saturn (except Hyperion) by fitting analytical theories to the observations using the method of least-squares (Harper & Taylor 1993). In this paper, we use the observed-minus-computed residuals to compare the quality of the numerous sets of observations of the satellites made during the period 1874 to 1988