A Scalable Real-Time Photometric System for Automatic Astronomical Observations on Dome A

Deployed on Dome A of Antarctica, the AST3 astronomical telescopes are required to perform the sky survey in the extreme unmanned environments and process the observed data in real-time to offer the astronomers far back home with the timely observation results. A scalable real-time photometric system is proposed and designed for the automatic astronomical observations of AST3. A GPU-based algorithm for image subtraction photometry is proposed to improve the efficiency of this most time-consuming prodedure in the data processing workflow. To impove the reliability, the system is organized in a HA cluster and equipped with a specially designed daemon. The system has been practically utilized in the astronomical observations with the development of AST3 telescopes.