In 2008 January the 24th Chinese expedition team successfully deployed the Chinese Small Telescope ARray (CSTAR) to DomeA, the highest point on the Antarctic plateau. CSTAR consists of four 14.5cm optical telescopes, each with a different filter (g, r, i and open) and has a 4.5degree x 4.5degree field of view (FOV). It operates robotically as part of the Plateau Observatory, PLATO, with each telescope taking an image every 30 seconds throughout the year whenever it is dark. During 2008, CSTAR #1 performed almost flawlessly, acquiring more than 0.3 million i-band images for a total integration time of 1728 hours during 158 days of observations. For each image taken under good sky conditions, more than 10,000 sources down to 16 mag could be detected. We performed aperture photometry on all the sources in the field to create the catalog described herein. Since CSTAR has a fixed pointing centered on the South Celestial Pole (Dec =-90 degree), all the sources within the FOV of CSTAR were monitored continuously for several months. The photometric catalog can be used for studying any variability in these sources, and for the discovery of transient sources such as supernovae, gamma-ray bursts and minor planets.
@article{arxiv.1001.4941,
title = {The First Release of the CSTAR Point Source Catalog from Dome A, Antarctica},
author = {Xu Zhou and Zhou Fan and Zhaoji Jiang and M. C. B. Ashley and Xiangqun Cui and Longlong Feng and Xuefei Gong and Jingyao Hu and C. A. Kulesa and J. S. Lawrence and Genrong Liu and D. M. Luong-Van and Jun Ma and A. M. Moore and Weijia Qin and Zhaohui Shang and J. W. V. Storey and Bo Sun and T. Travouillon and C. K. Walker and Jiali Wang and Lifan Wang and Jianghua Wu and Zhenyu Wu and Lirong Xia and Jun Yan and Ji Yang and Huigen Yang and Xiangyan Yuan and D. York and Zhanhai Zhang and Zhenxi Zhu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1001.4941},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
1 latex file and 9 figures The paper is accepted by PASP