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

The Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3, 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.