Measurement of the Bright and Fast Transient Foreground with the Evryscope Fast Transient Engine

The Evryscopes are a north/south pair of all-sky telescopes, each of which hosts an array of up to 27 small telescopes on a common mount. The two instruments, located on Cerro Tololo, Chile (deployed Q2 2015) and Mount Laguna, California (deployed Q3 2018), survey an instantaneous 16,512 sq. deg field of view at two-minute cadence. These characteristics open up a previously inaccessible parameter space of bright and fast astronomical transients across the full sky, including stellar flares, cataclysmic variables, novae, and potential optical counterparts of gravitational wave and fast radio burst events. As of summer 2019, both sites are running the Evryscope Fast Transient Engine (EFTE), a new software pipeline enabling real-time transient discovery across the full field of view of the Evryscopes, using a combination of a custom image subtraction algorithm and a machine-learning vetting system. Candidates are typically recorded within the observing cadence of the instruments, allowing automated, low-latency followup with other observatories, including spectroscopic classification on the 4.1 meter SOAR Telescope and photometry with the Skynet Robotic Telescope Network. In this talk, I will discuss the results of our first six months of EFTE operations, and present a preliminary census of the transient sky at minute-cadence.