Antarctic Survey Telescope 3-3: Overview, System Performance and Preliminary Observations at Yaoan, Yunnan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper describes the commissioning observations of AST3-3 survey telescope at Yaoan, Yunnan, by providing details on the instrument hardware and software designs and follow-up strategy to astronomical transients.  The paper presents two examples of follow-up effort on a supernova and a gamma-ray burst afterglow, where AST3-3 produces consistent and more densely sampled light curves compared to data gathered from other follow-up efforts.

I recommend the paper be accepted with the following minor revisions.

Title: Observation -> Observations

Introduction:
Large time-domain surveys have developed rapidly in recent years.: provide more references for these surveys internationally outside of China.

Mention when AST3-3 is expected to operate in Antarctica.

Figure 2: it would be beneficial to include a description of data and command flow for typical observations in the figure caption.

Line 234: perfect weather -> optimal weather conditions

Section 3.2.1 and 3.2.2, it would be beneficial to estimate the typical error circle of different triggers and the number of AST3-3 images to cover the grid.  Also provide this information in Table 3.

Figure 11: use much larger symbol sizes for the plot and differentiate data from different surveys more.

Figure 13: adding data from MASTER, Hankasalmi, and BOOTES to the plot.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for all your comments and suggestions!!

Please see the attachment.

Warm regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors present a detailed report of the implementation of the AST3-3 telescope. The detailed explanation of some aspects of the observing strategy and data collection can serve as a reference for future publications using this telescope and as a reference for the development of other optical facilities devoted to time-domain surveys.
Most of my comments with respect to the paper refer to information missing from the paper, that I would like the authors to include before accepting the paper for publication.
In detail:

"abstract: basic statistics of the first-year survey". The only statistical data presented is that since 2021, more than 40K images were obtained. This sentence should be removed from the abstract or basic statistics should be presented, for instance how many SNe, GRBs, variable stars, and so on were detected.

Lines 25 and 55-58: There are several existing time-domain optical surveys that should be cited in the introduction, in addition to those developed in China. For instance, for GRB science: 
TAROT: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003Msngr.113...45B/abstract
BOOTES: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1999A%26AS..138..583C/abstract
COATLI: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ab0026
MASTER:https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005Ap.....48..389L/abstract
and for 
Wide FOV-GWs/Transients
ZTF: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019PASP..131a8002B/abstract
ATLAS: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2018PASP..130f4505T/abstract
GOTO: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020MNRAS.497..726G/abstract
DDOTI. https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article-abstract/507/1/1401/6325187?redirectedFrom=PDF&login=false

Lines 52-54: "In the past...", "We also observed..." These sentences are unclear.

Lines 85, 88: "Tega bytes" are Terabytes?

Line 177: "for various reasons". Which reasons? Please specify

Figure 3: it is very difficult to see the magnitudes, please change the colors (the text in white could be much more visible)

Section 3.1: What is the size of the area monitored each night? What is the duration of each observation?

Equation 1: What are the different terms? N_pix, rho_i, \hat{N}, and so on.

Line 375: "discovered" --> detected/followed/etc (it was discovered by PanStarrs)

Section 4.3: The authors should provide more information on this GRB, in the context of their observations, to show why these observations are relevant scientifically. What is the slope of the GRB afterglow? Is this GRB long or short? What are the implications for the energy, density of the environment, and so on, if any?

Finally: What is the aperture of the telescope? This is not specified. It would also improve the paper substantially if the authors can clearly discuss this telescope in terms of other similar instruments, e.g. in terms of diameter, the field of view of the telescope, and, more in general, the possible advantage of doing science with this telescope (if any) with respect to others.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for all your comments and suggestions!!

Warm regards,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf