GCN Circular 34480
Subject
GRB 230818A: GOTO optical afterglow detection
Date
2023-08-19T01:17:17Z (9 months ago)
From
Ben Gompertz at U of Birmingham <b.gompertz@bham.ac.uk>
Via
email
B. P. Gompertz, A. Kumar, K. Wiersema, B. Godson, D. O’Neill, B. Warwick, R. Starling, K. Ackley; M. J. Dyer; J. Lyman; K. Ulaczyk; F. Jimenez-Ibarra; D. Steeghs; D. K. Galloway; V. Dhillon; P. O'Brien; G. Ramsay; K. Noysena; R. Kotak; R. P. Breton; L. K. Nuttall; E. Pall'e and D. Pollacco report on behalf of the GOTO collaboration:
The Gravitational-wave Optical Transient Observer (GOTO; Steeghs et al. 2022) observed the field of the X-ray (Tohuvavohu et al., GCN 34479) and optical (Lipunov et al, GCN 34476) counterparts to GRB 230818A (Fermi GBM Team, GCN 34478; Tohuvavohu et al., GCN 34479) at 23:32:00 UT on 2023-08-18, 266 seconds after trigger. The observation consisted of 4x90s exposures in the GOTO L-band (400-700 nm).
Images were processed immediately after acquisition using the GOTO pipeline. Difference imaging was performed using recent survey observations of the same pointing. We detect the optical counterpart reported by MASTER (GCN 34476) with a preliminary magnitude of L = 17.75 ± 0.02 mag.
Magnitudes were calibrated using ATLAS-REFCAT2 (Tonry et al. 2018) and are not corrected for Galactic extinction.
Observations are ongoing.
GOTO (https://goto-observatory.org) is a network of telescopes operated at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, Spain, and Siding Spring Observatory in NSW, Australia, on behalf of a consortium including the University of Warwick, Monash University, Armagh Observatory & Planetarium, the University of Leicester, the University of Sheffield, the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand (NARIT), the University of Turku, the University of Portsmouth, the University of Manchester and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC).