TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER:  3202
SUBJECT: GRB 050408 Optical Observations
DATE:    05/04/09 07:47:47 GMT
FROM:    Kuntal Mishra at ARIES,Nainital,India  <kuntal@upso.ernet.in>

Kuntal Misra, S. B. Pandey (ARIES Naini Tal) and Atish P. Kamble
(Raman Research Institute, Bangalore) on behalf of larger Indian
GRB collaboration

We acquired V, R, I frames of GRB 050408 error box localized by HETE-II
(GCN 3189) and SWIFT (GCN 3191) around 2 hours after the burst in thin
cloudy conditions. The afterglow candidate by Postigo et al. (GCN 3192)
is seen in our frames. The magnitude of our frame taken around 2.4 hours
after the burst (exp-time 300secx2) is R_c = 20.4 +/- 0.2, calibrated with
respect to USNO B1.0 stars 1008-0199794 (R ~ 16.62) and
1008-0199752 (R ~ 15.89).

Our derived magnitude in combination with the R band magnitudes by
Aslan et al. (GCN 3198) follow the power law decay index of 0.70 +/- 0.06,
consistent to those by Huang et al. (GCN 3196) and Aslan et al. (GCN 
3198).

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