{
  "bibcode": "2003GCN..2011....1B",
  "body": "GRB 030329: Optical pre-Imaging\n\nC. Blake (Princeton) and J. S. Bloom (CfA) report:\n\n\"Using a signal-to-noise weighted stack of 50 NEAT images (taken from\n1997-2002), we do not detect a counterpart at the position of the\ntransient afterglow of GRB 030329 (Price & Peterson; GCN #1985). The\nimages were acquired by R. Bambery, S. Pravdo, M. Hicks, and K. Lawrence\n(Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking Project, Jet Propulsion Laboratory). We\ntherefore estimate the upper limit to the brightness of any host galaxy as\nR=23.1 (2 sigma) or R=22.5 (3 sigma).  This result is consistent with the\nsomewhat more shallow limits reported in Wood-Vasey et al. (GCN #1998).\nThe absence of a host to such magnitude levels suggests a redshift of z >~\n0.2, despite the extreme brightness of the early afterglow.\n\nWithin 7.5 arcseconds of the position of the OT, we find two sources\nthat are marginally detected (at the R=22.5 mag level):\n\n------------------------------------------------------------------\n      RA(J2000)       DEC                  Source-->OT\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n A: 10:44:49.776, +21:31:16.49    3.54\" East, 1.66\" North  d=3.91\"\n B: 10:44:50.065  +21:31:10.77   -0.49\" East, 7.38\" North, d=7.40\"\n\nPositional errors relative to the USNO-B1.0 catalog are 0.5\". These\nsources are shown in an image linked from the webpage given below.\nPhotometric calibration of the stacked image was performed using the\nUSNO-B1.0 catalog. Some photometric secondary stars in the field are\nlisted below:\n\n   RA(J2000)  DEC              R        B\n\t\t  \t      mag      mag\n-----------------------------------------------------\n10:44:55.17 +21:28:11.3      17.69     18.48\n10:44:43.40 +21:27:58.4      18.41     19.46\n10:44:44.06 +21:27:18.5      18.52     20.47\n10:44:53.61 +21:30:11.6      17.45     18.41\n10:45:04.39 +21:29:56.1      18.22     20.37\n10:44:55.67 +21:31:22.2      19.08     19.95\n10:44:54.97 +21:31:42.7      18.51     20.36\n10:44:48.68 +21:31:39.8      18.95     19.30\n10:44:42.00 +21:32:31.7      15.08     18.18\n10:44:50.44 +21:32:05.8      16.61     17.99\n10:44:59.44 +21:31:43.9      18.07     19.84\n-------------------------------------------------------\n\nFinally, we note an object at (J2000) 10:44:55 +21:31:05.9, which\nappeared in the DSS-II image, and is listed in the USNO-B1.0 as being\nR=19.60, was detected at only R=21.9 in our stacked image.\"\n\nA stacked image from NEAT that includes the WCS in the header may be\nfound at:\n        http://astro.princeton.edu/~cblake/030329.html\n\nThis message can be cited.",
  "circularId": 2011,
  "createdOn": 1048985345000,
  "email": "jbloom@cfa.harvard.edu",
  "subject": "GRB 030329: Optical pre-Imaging",
  "submitter": "Josh Bloom at Harvard/CFA  <jbloom@cfa.harvard.edu>",
  "eventId": "GRB 030329"
}