GCN Circular 16731
Subject
GRB 140817A: NOT optical observations
Date
2014-08-21T16:01:53Z (10 years ago)
From
Daniele Malesani at Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Inst <malesani@dark-cosmology.dk>
Daniele Malesani (DARK/NBI), Jyri Lehtinen (Univ. Helsinki), and Pall
Jakobsson (Univ. Iceland), report on behalf of a larger collaboration:
We observed the field of GRB 140817A (Sbarufatti et al., GCN 16695) with
the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) equipped with the AlFOSC camera.
Observations were carried out starting on 2014 Aug 20.23 UT (2.94 days
after the GRB), at high airmass and in twilight, for a total exposure of
15 min.
No source is detected at the position of the UVOT optical afterglow
(Marshall & Sbarufatti, GCN 16710) nor within the XRT error circle
(Sbarufatti, GCN 16696; Osborne et al., GCN 16697) down to a 3-sigma
limiting magnitude of R = 21 (calibrated against the USNO-B1.0 catalog).
The galaxy MCG +10-12-141 at z ~ 0.018, around 1 arcmin away of the XRT
position, is well detected in our images (Cummings & Page, GCN 16698).
We note that a supernova similar to SN 1998bw would have R ~ 17.5 at z =
0.018 at a comparable epoch. We thus disfavor the association of GRB
140817A with the nearby galaxy.