GCN Circular 39572
Subject
EP250302a: Kinder optical follow-up observations
Date
2025-03-03T14:21:48Z (12 days ago)
From
Amar Aryan at National Central University, Institute of Astronomy (NCUIA) <amararyan941@gmail.com>
Via
Web form
A. Aryan, T.-W. Chen, C.-S. Lin (all NCU), A. K. H. Kong (NTHU), J. Gillanders (Oxford), S. J. Smartt (Oxford/QUB), Y. J. Yang, A. Sankar. K, Y.-C. Pan, C.-C. Ngeow, W.-J. Hou, M.-H. Lee, H.-C. Lin, C.-H. Lai, H.-Y. Hsiao, J.-K. Guo (all NCU), S. Yang, L. L. Fan, Z. N. Wang, G. H. Sun (all HNAS), H.-W. Lin (UMich), H. F. Stevance, S. Srivastav, L. Rhodes (all Oxford), M. Nicholl, M. Fulton, T. Moore, K. W. Smith, C. Angus, A. Aamer (all QUB), A. Schultz and M. Huber (both IfA, Hawaii) report:
We observed the field of the fast X-ray transient EP250302a (Zhu et al., GCN 39550; Dai et al., GCN 39556) using the 40cm SLT at Lulin Observatory in Taiwan as part of the Kinder collaboration (Chen & Yang et al. 2024, arXiv:2406.09270). The first SLT epoch of observations in the r band started at 18:30 UT on the 2nd of March 2025 (MJD = 60736.771), ~2.91 hrs after the EP trigger.
We took a total of 12 frames in r-band spanning a period of about 2.91hr to 5.22hr since the EP-WXT trigger. The optical counterpart candidate proposed by Zhu et al., (GCN 39550 ) and confirmed by several other observations (Busmann et al., GCN 39551; Leonini et al., GCN 39553; Wu et al., GCN 39555; Xin et al., GCN 39558; Adami et al., GCN 39560; Yang et al., GCN 39561; Becerra et al., GCN 39562; and Izzo et al., GCN 39564), was clearly detected in almost each of the individual frame (besides the last frame).
We utilized the Python-based package AutoPhOT (Brennan & Fraser, 2022, A&A, 667, A62) to perform PSF photometry on individual frames. The details of the observation and measured photometry from the first frame (in the AB system) were as follows:
Telescope | Filter | MJD (start) | t-t0 (hr) | Exposure (s) | Magnitude | Seeing | Airmass
SLT | r | 60736.771 | 2.91 | 300 * 1 | 19.60 +/- 0.05 | 1".25 | 1.14
The presented magnitude was calibrated using the field stars from the Pan-STARRS1 catalog and was not corrected for the expected Galactic foreground extinction corresponding to a reddening of A_r = 0.06 mag, respectively, in the direction of the transient (Schlafly & Finkbeiner 2011).