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The RAPTOR system (RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response) is an array of several distributed robotic telescopes that automatically respond to GCN localization alerts. Raptor‐S is a 0.4‐m telescope with 24 arc min. field of view employing a 1k × 1k Marconi CCD detector, and has already detected prompt optical emission from several GRBs within the first minute of the explosion. We present a real‐time data analysis and alert system for automated identification of optical transients in Raptor‐S GRB response data down to the sensitivity limit of ∼ 19 mag. Our custom data processing pipeline is designed to minimize the time required to reliably identify transients and extract actionable information. The system utilizes a networked PostgreSQL database server for catalog access and distributes email alerts with successful detections.

While it has been known for centuries that the optical sky is variable, monitoring the sky for optical transients with durations as short as a minute is an area of astronomical research that remains largely unexplored. Prompt follow‐up observations of Gamma Ray Bursts have shown that bright, explosive, optical transients exist. However, there are many reasons to suspect the existence of explosive optical transients that cannot be located through sky monitoring by high‐energy satellites. The RAPTOR sky monitoring system is an autonomous system of telescope arrays at Los Alamos National Laboratory that identifies fast optical transients as short as a minute and makes follow‐up observations in real time. The core of the RAPTOR system is composed of two arrays of telescopes, separated by 38 kilometers, that stereoscopically monitor a field of about 1300 square degrees for transients down to about 12.5th magnitude in 30 seconds. Both arrays are coupled to real‐time data analysis pipelines that are designed to identify transients on timescales of seconds. Each telescope array also contains a more sensitive higher resolution “fovea” telescope, capable of both measuring the light curve at a faster cadence and providing color information. In a manner analogous to human vision, each array is mounted on a rapidly slewing mount so that the “fovea” of the array can be rapidly directed for real‐time follow‐up observations of any interesting transient identified by the wide‐field system. We discuss the first results from RAPTOR and show that stereoscopic imaging and the absence of measurable parallax is a powerful tool for distinguishing real celestial transients in the “forest” of false positives.