TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER:  38676
SUBJECT: GRB 241217A/EP241217b: continued SOAR observations 
DATE:    24/12/27 03:27:44 GMT
FROM:    James Freeburn at Swinburne University of Technology <jamesfreeburn54@gmail.com>

J. Freeburn (Swinburne/OzGrav), I. Andreoni (UNC)

We observed the location of the optical counterpart (Qiu et al., GCN 38600) to SVOM GRB 241217A / EP241217b (Brunet et al., GCN 38594; William et al., GCN 38599; Zhou et al., GCN 38606), with the Goodman High Throughput Spectrograph mounted on the SOAR telescope in imaging mode. We took six 300s exposures in r-band between 2024-12-24T04:43:11 and 2024-12-24T05:14:22 UTC.

With difference imaging using a template from the Dark Energy Survey (Abbott et al., 2021, ApJ, 255, 20) and photometric calibration using the Pan-STARRS1 catalogue, we do not detect the optical counterpart and place an upper limit of r > 24.5 AB magnitude.