AST3-2 is the second of the three Antarctic Survey Telescopes, aimed at wide-field time-domain optical astronomy. It is located at Dome A, Antarctica, which is by many measures the best optical astronomy site on the Earth's surface. Here we present the data from the AST3-2 automatic survey in 2016 and the photometry results. The median 5σ limiting magnitude in i-band is 17.8 mag and the light curve precision is 4 mmag for bright stars. The data release includes photometry for over 7~million stars, from which over 3,500 variable stars were detected, with 70 of them newly discovered. We classify these new variables into different types by combining their light curve features with stellar properties from surveys such as StarHorse.
@article{arxiv.2302.06997,
title = {Data Release of the AST3-2 Automatic Survey from Dome A, Antarctica},
author = {Xu Yang and Yi Hu and Zhaohui Shang and Bin Ma and Michael C. B. Ashley and Xiangqun Cui and Fujia Du and Jianning Fu and Xuefei Gong and Bozhong Gu and Peng Jiang and Xiaoyan Li and Zhengyang Li and Charling Tao and Lifan Wang and Lingzhe Xu and Shi-hai Yang and Ce Yu and Xiangyan Yuan and Ji-lin Zhou and Zhenxi Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.06997},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
16 pages, 20 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS