  The three Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3) aim to carry out time domain
imaging survey at Dome A, Antarctica. The first of the three telescopes
(AST3-1) was successfully deployed on January 2012. AST3-1 is a 500\,mm
aperture modified Schmidt telescope with a 680\,mm diameter primary mirror.
AST3-1 is equipped with a SDSS $i$ filter and a 10k $\times$ 10k frame transfer
CCD camera, reduced to 5k $\times$ 10k by electronic shuttering, resulting in a
4.3 deg$^2$ field-of-view. To verify the capability of AST3-1 for a variety of
science goals, extensive commissioning was carried out between March and May
2012. The commissioning included a survey covering 2000 deg$^2$ as well as the
entire Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Frequent repeated images were made of
the center of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a selected exoplanet transit field,
and fields including some Wolf-Rayet stars. Here we present the data reduction
and photometric measurements of the point sources observed by AST3-1. We have
achieved a survey depth of 19.3\,mag in 60 s exposures with 5\,mmag precision
in the light curves of bright stars. The facility achieves sub-mmag photometric
precision under stable survey conditions, approaching its photon noise limit.
These results demonstrate that AST3-1 at Dome A is extraordinarily competitive
in time-domain astronomy, including both quick searches for faint transients
and the detection of tiny transit signals.
