CSTAR photometry of 21845 stars around the South Celestial Pole observed from Kunlun Station at Dome A

Brief description

The original CSTAR (Chinese Small Telescope ARray) consisted of four identical f/1.2 Schmidt telescopes on a common mount, located at Kunlun Station at Dome A, Antarctica.

The CSTAR mount was fixed to look at the South Celestial Pole, with no tracking, in order to simplify the instrument. Each telescope had an entrance aperture of 145 mm and a 4.5 x 4.5 degree field-of-view. The telescopes used Andor 1k x 1k CCDs with a pixel size of 13 microns, giving 15 arcseconds per pixel. Each telescope observed through a different filter: either g, r, i or open.

CSTAR was developed by Purple Mountain Observatory, the Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics and Technology, and the National Astronomical Observatories of China. CSTAR was supported by UNSW's PLATO observatory.

The original CSTAR operated from 2008 to 2011 inclusive, producing about 3 TB of image data. The star catalog and photometry from 2008 is available here:

http://casdc.china-vo.org/archive/cstar/

and duplicated in the AAD data archive. The data are freely available. You are invited to cite the relevant papers in the "papers/" directory.

The data are described in the following two papers:

Wang, L., Macri, L. M., Krisciunas, K., Wang, L., Ashley, M. C. B., Cui, X., Feng, L.-L., Gong, X., Lawrence, J. S., Liu, Q., Luong-Van, D., Pennypacker, C. R., Shang, Z., Storey, J. W. V., Yang, H., Yang, J., Yuan, X., York, D. G., Zhou, X., Zhu, Z., 2011, Photometry of Variable Stars from Dome A, Antarctica, The Astronomical Journal, 142, 155.

Zhou, X., Fan, Z., Jiang, Z., Ashley, M. C. B., Cui, X., Feng, L., Gong, X., Hu, J., Kulesa, C. A., Lawrence, J. S., Liu, G., Luong-Van, D. M., Ma, J., Moore, A. M., Qin, W., Shang, Z., Storey, J. W. V., Sun, B., Travouillon, T., Walker, C. K., Wang, J., Wang, L., Wu, J., Wu, Z., Xia, L., Yan, J., Yang, J., Yang, H., Yuan, X., York, D., Zhang, Z., Zhu, Z., 2010, The First Release of the CSTAR Point Source Catalogue from Dome A, Antarctica, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 122, 347–353.

The files/directories here are:

README.txt A description of the data.
papers/ Published papers from CSTAR (listed below).
catalog.dat The coordinates of the 21845 stars in this study.
catalog.fits The catalogue in FITS format.
png/ Light curves for each of the 21845 stars.
fits/ The photometric data in FITS format.

In January 2015 a new CSTAR instrument was installed. This consists of two of the original CSTAR telescopes, placed on a tracking mount.

For more information visit the website of the Chinese Center for Antarctic Astronomy (CCAA).