Overview of Ground-based Wide-Angle Cameras array

TL;DR

The paper provides an overview of the GWAC array, a ground-based facility designed to detect prompt optical emissions from gamma-ray bursts and transients, highlighting its hardware, software, and scientific achievements.

Contribution

It introduces the GWAC system, detailing its hardware, software, observation strategies, and summarizes five years of scientific results.

Findings

GWAC can detect objects down to 16 magnitude in 10 seconds.

The array covers about 3600 square degrees of the sky.

Five years of observations have yielded significant early scientific results.

Abstract

As one of the key ground-based facilities of the Chinese-French SVOM mission, the main scientific objectives of the Ground-based Wide Angle Camera array (GWAC) are to detect prompt optical emission of gamma-ray bursts or other short duration astronomical transients on a second-scale temporal resolution. GWAC is located at Xinglong observatory, China, and consists of 10 mounts and 40 cameras, providing a joint field of view of about 3600 square degrees.The detection ability is 16 magnitude in 10 seconds of exposure time in the visual band under the condition of the new moon phase. Here, we give an overview of GWAC and introduce the science motivation of the project, as well as the performance of the hardware and the software. The observation strategies and the data processing are briefly presented. The early sciences in the last 5 years since the first light are summarized.