The advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors scheduled to come online in the next two years will open up the much anticipated era of gravitational wave astronomy. Among the strongest contenders for the first detection are merging binary neutron stars, a fraction of which are also expected to produce observable electromagnetic signals in coincidence with the gravitational wave events. In this paper we investigate the strategy of using gravitational wave sky-localizations that we can expect to see in the first two years of the advanced detector era, to look for electromagnetic counterparts using wide field of view optical telescopes. The key to efficient observation of the gravitational wave sky-localizations is to obtain the optimal discretized approximation of the sky-localizations, where the coarseness of the discretization will depend on the field of view of the telescope. We examine various strategies of scanning these sky-localizations and propose the ranked-tiling strategy that we found to be the most effective and that requires the least amount of fine-tuning. We discuss the concept of distributed field-of-view arrays, which use multiple telescopes in a synchronous fashion with an effective FOV equal to the sum of all the individual telescopes in the context of covering the sky-localizations. We show that such arrays will be more efficient than monolithic large FOV telescopes in scanning the sky-localizations in the first two years of operation of the LIGO and Virgo interferometers. This result underscores the importance of using multiple non-local telescopes in a joint fashion to target the gravitational wave sky-localizations.
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