The Design and Implementation of a Wide-Field Optical Transient Identification System

Ground Wide Angle Camera (GWAC) will initially select thousands of transient candidates in every 2.5 minutes. These candidates may be supernova, variable stars, moving objects, or noise. To identify and manage these candidates, we design and develop an optical transient identification system based on the web framework Django. This system will implement the database management system in the backend and web interactive display in the frontend. The system mainly includes the following functions:transient candidates management, light curve processing and display, crosscheck with multiple known celestial catalogs and interactive identification interface for the scientists. Due to Django's excellent characteristics, this system can provide a good command mode interactive interface, which makes the scientists operate the database in an object-oriented manner without any extra-developed codes. The system has been tested by observation data from the Mini-GWAC. The test indicates that transient candidates can be classified and identified correctly. It is a useful tool for astronomers to identify transient candidates with its preliminary identification and abundant information from automatically processing. This program can be used for other similar transient surveys in practice.