Artificial Intelligence in Astronomical Optical Telescopes: Present Status and Future Perspectives

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Interesting and exhaustive review, trying to access all sides of observational astronomy from the side of potential AI applications.

My detailed comments are in the pdf file. My general comment is that it is very challenging when reading the paper to distinguish what is pure automation or modelling (e.g. classical adaptive optics or meteorological prediction models) from potential improvements brought by AI technology. Maybe the problem is that AI technology is not clearly defined: is a temperature prediction neural network developed in the 90s an AI tool?

I was expecting more from section 2.3. (Intelligent Scheduling) which is in my view a key topic where AI (understood as "using computers to do things that traditionally require human intelligence") could boost observing efficiency: in most ground based observatories, short term scheduling is still in the hands of resident astronomers or experimented telescope operators who must take programmatic decisions on multi-instrumented foci in constantly changing observing conditions. The amount of parameters to be taken into account for an optimal scheduling of the observing queues clearly exceeds human capability.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We appreciate your precious time spent reviewing our paper and providing valuable comments. We have carefully considered the comments and tried our best to address every one of them. The detail is shown attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript is written in a very casual manner despite being considered as a review article. Most of contents/texts have been frequently repeated throughout the manuscript. For example, texts in lines from 6-10 are similar to lines 63-67. Lines 38-49 are exactly same as the lines 51-61. Manuscript lacks significantly lacks original content. Motivation behind this exercise of writing the review article remains unclear. Title of the manuscript suggests AI in the context of optical telescopes. However, there are several state-of-the-art ground-based gamma-ray telescopes like HESS, MAGIC, LST and MACE, operating around the globe, which make an extensive use of AI techniques. Authors have not tried to demonstrate in the manuscript how exactly an AI technique is useful in the successful  operation of even optical telescopes.

Therefore, in my opinion, the manuscript is not suitable for publication.

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Manuscript is not suitable for publication in the current form and also there is no scope for improvement. 

Author Response

We appreciate your precious time spent reviewing our paper and providing valuable comments. We have carefully considered the comments and tried our best to address every one of them. The details are shown attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In this manuscript, the authors present a brief review on the application of artificial intelligence in the field of astronomical optical telescopes. The role of AI in various aspects of telescope operation is described, including selecting telescope sites, calibrating optical systems, diagnosing faults, optimizing image quality, making observational decisions, and enhancing the intelligence of databases. The current status as well as future directions are introduced. This review is informative. I believe it would be interesting to the astronomy community. However, I also noticed some problems in the current version. I would like to suggest the authors to revise the manuscript before possibly recommending it for publication. 

Major issues: 

(1) P2, Lines 50 -- 62, please note that these sentences are completely the same as those in Lines 38 -- 49. They are simply repeatition. Please remove them. 

 

(2) P3, Lines 70 -- 74, in the last paragraph of Section 1, the authors write: "The first part introduces ... . The second part discusses .... . Finally, ..."   I thought that it is not clear what is "the first part" and what is "the second part". The authors can simply write clearly as: "Section 2 introduces ... . Section 3 discusses, .... Finally, ... in Section 4. "

(3) There are too many abbreviations in the manuscript, which significantly reduces the readability of the article, and makes it very difficult for the readers to understand the contents. What's more, some abbreviations are not defined, and some abbreviations are defined repeatedly. Below, I simply list some of the problematic abbreviations: 

  (i) P5, Line 134, AXP is not defined. 

  (ii) P8, Line 234, MTF is defined here, but not used later. 

  (iii) P11, Line 347, RNN, this abbreviation has already been defined in Line 152 on P5.  It does not need to be re-defined here. Note that it later was  even defined for the third time in Line 462 on P15. 

  (iv) P11, MPIQ in Line 358 is not defined and it only appears two times in  the whole text, thus it is not necessary. Also MDN and RVAE in  Lines 358 -360 are not defined and they are all un-necessary.  AO in Line 362 is also not necessary. AO is re-defined in Line 378.

  (v) P13, Line 394, GAN defined but not used later; Line 426, PCAD defined  but not used later. 

  (vi) P15, Line 465, PNe defined but not used later; Line 469, IEF-SCNN  defined but not used later. 

I simply cannot list all the problems concerning the abbreviations. I would like to suggest the authors to carefull check all the abbreviations. Please use as fewer abbreviations as possible. For those necessary abbreviations,  please carefully define them. 

(4) P6 -- P7, Lines 169 -- 173: Ni et al. used data from ..... and transformer. This is a very long sentence, but its meaning is not clear. Ni et al. used these data for what? What have Ni et al. done? Please express your meaning clearly. 

(5) P14, note that some of the contents of Table 2 is cut off. Please make sure that these contents are displayed correctly. 

(6) P14, Line 458, "and quasars with spectral redshift less than 248.0 in the SDSS database."  Why the redshif is 248.0? Why it is so large? 

(6) P21, Lines 686--687, the first sentence in the Author Contributions section, "For research articles with several authors, ... The following statements should be used". I found these two sentences very strange. Maybe they are explanations from the editor. Maybe these two sentences should be removed. 

(7) P21, Lines 700-702, in the Acknowledgments section, "In this section you can acknowledge .... (e.g., materials used for experiments)."  Similarly, I think these sentences should be removed. They are explanations from the editor. 

(8) P22 Line 732, in the reference item of 14, there are repeative information on the volume and page, i.e. vol. 257, no.2, p. 811-816, appears twice. 

(9) P23, Line 831, in the reference item of 65, pp.8-pp, end page number information is missing here?

(10) P24, Line 842, reference item 70, no page number after 2023 ?

(11) P27, Line 1038, reference item 164, no page number after 2023, 61?

 

Minor problems: 

(1) P1, Line 9, in the Abstract: "All kinds of research directions are evaluated"  It is better to change "All" to "Various". The word of "all" is too absolute.  It is not safe to claim that you have covered All kinds of directions. In the main text, there are also similar sentenses, which should also be revised  correspondingly. For example, see Line 66. Please check other places by   yourselves. 

(2) P1, Line 18, although the abbreviation of "AI" has been defined in the   Abstract section, I thought that it should be re-defined again when it first appears in the main text. 

(3) P6, in Table 1, "wind, relative humidity, et al.",    et al. usually refers to people, it should be changed to something like etc. 

(4) P8, in the caption of Figure 5, traine ---> train,  this is a typo. 

(5) P8, Line 228, dis-turbances ---> disturbances 

(6) P8, Line 238, -139 \lambda -139 \lambda, I think the authors may mean something like -139 \lambda --- +139 \lambda. Please express this range in a more clear way. 

(7) P12, Line 378, "some training and testing ....": this should be a new sentence. Change "some" to "Some". 

(8) P15, Line 481, "to classify quasar stars", maybe you should remove the word of "stars" and change it to "to classify quasars". 

(9) P15, Line 496, "for instance, based on ...", this should be a new  sentence.    based ---> Based 

(10) P17, Line 523, within ---> in 

(11) P17, Line 539, in the Figure 10 ---> in Figure 10 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Please use as less abbreviations as possible. Currently there are too many abbreviations. 

Author Response

We appreciate your precious time spent reviewing our paper and providing valuable comments. We have carefully considered the comments and tried our best to address every one of them. The details are shown in attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

First, I would like to thank the authors for their positive and serious consideration of my previous comments. Authors have significantly improved the over all content and writing of the manuscript. In my opinion, the revised manuscript can be accepted for publication as a Review Article.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Authors need to have a serious re-look of the grammar and writing  throughout the manuscript before final publication if the manuscript is accepted. There is a scope to improve the manuscript in terms of writing.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In this manuscript, the authors present a brief review on the application of artificial intelligence in the field of astronomical optical telescopes. The role of AI in various aspects of telescope operation is described, including selecting telescope sites, calibrating optical systems, diagnosing faults, optimizing image quality, making observational decisions, and enhancing the intelligence of databases. The current status as well as future directions are introduced. This review is informative. I believe it would be interesting to the astronomy community. The problems in the previous version have been well addressed. I would like to recommend this manuscript for publication in Universe. 

Minor wording suggestions: 

(1) P3, Line 79, are summarized in Section 5 

       --->are summarized in Section 4 

(2) P9, Line 270, y_im present the state 

      ---> y_im presents the state

(3) P9, Line 275, state is update 

     ---> state is updated 

(4) P9, a full stop or a comma should be added behind Equations (1) -- (3). 

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English is generally good.