Pipeline for the Antarctic Survey Telescope 3-3 in Yaoan, Yunnan

AST3-3 is the third robotic facility of the Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3) for transient surveys to be deployed at Dome A, Antarctica. Due to the current pandemic, the telescope has been currently deployed at the Yaoan Observation Station in China, starting the commissioning observation and a tr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences
Main Authors: Tianrui Sun, Lei Hu, Songbo Zhang, Xiaoyan Li, Kelai Meng, Xuefeng Wu, Lifan Wang, A. J. Castro-Tirado
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2022
Subjects:
data analysis—astrometry—instrumentation
image processing
photometric—(stars)
transient detection
convolutional neural networks—CNN
Astronomy
QB1-991
Geophysics. Cosmic physics
QC801-809
Antarctic
The Antarctic
Antarc*
Antarctica
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.3389/fspas.2022.897100
https://doaj.org/article/d186658962d9438e94179cbba76f5f34
Description
Summary:AST3-3 is the third robotic facility of the Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3) for transient surveys to be deployed at Dome A, Antarctica. Due to the current pandemic, the telescope has been currently deployed at the Yaoan Observation Station in China, starting the commissioning observation and a transient survey. This article presented a fully automatic data processing system for AST3-3 observations. The transient detection pipeline uses state-of-the-art image subtraction techniques optimized for GPU devices. Image reduction and transient photometry are accelerated by concurrent task methods. Our Python-based system allows for transient detection from wide-field data in a real-time and accurate way. A ResNet-based rotational-invariant neural network was employed to classify the transient candidates. As a result, the system enables the auto-generation of transients and their light curves.

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