The Rise of Astrophysical Transients

The dawn of the digital era has completely revolutionized how humans observe the night sky. Gone are the days when obtaining and analyzing a single image took many hours of human-intensive labor. Instead, computers have automated the majority of the tedious data processing tasks. I will provide a brief overview of how observational astronomers leverage high-performance computing in our search for weird and interesting events occurring throughout the Universe. Then, I will highlight some particularly unique discoveries I have led over the past few years as we survey the night sky at higher cadence and depth. Finally, I will look to the (not-so-distant) future as we prepare for the next generation of sky surveys to come online.