Stellar photometry from the AST3-1 telescope at Kunlun Station at Dome A

The Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3, http://aag.bao.ac.cn/ast3/) consist of three 50/68cm modified Schmidt telescopes, equipped with 10k x 10k STA1600FT CCD cameras. The AST3 telescopes were designed for multi-band wide-field astronomical surveys at Dome A, Antarctica with a field-of-view of 4.3 square degrees. The first AST3 (AST3-1) was deployed to Dome A, Antarctica by the 28th Chinese Antarctic Research Expedition (CHINARE) team in January 2012, and became the largest optical telescope in Antarctica. AST3-1 started operation in mid March 2012, when the polar day ended, but unfortunately stopped working on 8 May 2012 due to some malfunction in the power supply system. Until then, AST3-1 had repeatedly surveyed nearly 2,000 deg^2 to search SNe with more than 3,000 60-sec exposures, and monitored several fields, including the center of the Large Magellanic Cloud with greater than 4,700 frames, a field in the Galactic disk for exoplanet transit surveying with greater than 3,000 frames, and the Wolf-Rayet star HD 143414 with greater than 1,000 frames. The data were retrieved by the 29th CHINARE team in April 2013, then have been processed by the Antarctic Astronomy Group at NAOC.

AST3-1 was supported by UNSW's PLATO observatory infrastructure.

The data are available here:

http://explore.china-vo.org/?locale=en

and are described in the following peer-reviewed paper:

Ma, B., Shang, Z., Hu, Y., Hu, K., Liu, Q., Ashley, M. C. B., Cui, X., Du, F., Fan, D., Feng, L., Huang, F., Gu, B., He, B., Ji, T., Li, X., Li, Z., Liu, H., Tian, Q., Tao, C., Wang, D., Wang, L., Wang, S., Wang, X., Wei, P., Wu, J., Xu, L., Yang, S., Yang, M., Yang, Y., Yu, C., Yuan, X., Zhou, H., Zhang, H., Zhang, X., Zhang, Y., Zhao, C., Zhou, J., Zhu, Z.-H., 2018, The first release of the AST3-1 Point Source Catalogue from Dome A, Antarctica, MNRAS, 479, 111–120., doi:10.1093/mnras/sty1392, Sep/2018