2022A&A...667A..62B

We present the Automated Photometry of Transients (AUTOPHOT) package, a novel automated pipeline that is designed for rapid, publication-quality photometry of astronomical transients. AUTOPHOT is built from the ground up using PYTHON 3 - with no dependencies on legacy software. Capabilities of AUTOPHOT include aperture and point-spread-function photometry, template subtraction, and calculation of limiting magnitudes through artificial source injection. AUTOPHOT is also capable of calibrating photometry against either survey catalogues, or using a custom set of local photometric standards, and is designed primarily for ground-based optical and infrared images. We show that both aperture and point-spread-function photometry from AUTOPHOT is consistent with commonly used software, for example, DAOPHOT, and also demonstrate that AUTOPHOT can reproduce published light curves for a selection of transients with minimal human intervention.