BTSbot automates real-time identification of bright extragalactic transients in Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) data. A multi-modal convolutional neural network, BTSbot provides a bright transient score to individual ZTF detections using their image data and 25 extracted features. The package eliminates the need for daily visual inspection of new transients by automatically identifying and requesting spectroscopic follow-up observations of new bright transient candidates. BTSbot recovers all bright transients in our test split and performs on par with human experts in terms of identification speed (on average, ∼1 hour quicker than scanners).

Astroquery allows users to access online astronomical data from a wide range of sources; it is an Astropy-affiliated package. Each web service has its own sub-package for interfacing with a particular data source.