TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER:  36824
SUBJECT: EP240703a: BTA observations
DATE:    24/07/04 22:54:06 GMT
FROM:    Alexei Pozanenko at IKI, Moscow <grb.alex@gmail.com>

 A. Volnova (IKI), A. Moskvitin (SAO RAS), A. Pozanenko (IKI), D. Oparin
(SAO RAS), N. Pankov (IKI, HSE), S. Belkin (IKI, HSE) on behalf of GRB IKI
FuN report:

We observed the TRT candidate afterglow position (An et al., GCN 36815) of
the X-ray transient EP240703a (Wang et al., GCN 36807) and probable
gamma-ray burst GRB 240703A (Frederiks et al., GCN 36809) with BTA SAO RAS
telescope equipped with SCORPIO-1 camera in Ic filter starting on
2024-07-03 (UT) 20:50:07, i.e. 0.856 days after burst.
We did not detect the TRT candidate afterglow (An et al., GCN 36815) which
might be a spurious event (An et al., GCN 36820). At the stacked images of
9x180 s we obtained an upper limit of Ic= 24.6m (3 sigma). We cannot
confirm that the TRT afterglow candidate (An et al., GCN 36815) is real.
Our result is consistent with reported results (Aryan et al., GCN 36819,
Bochenek and Perley GCN 36821; Fernandez-Garcia et al., GCN 36822).

We are grateful to the Directorate of the Special Astrophysical Observatory
for allocation of  the TOO observation.