GCN Circular 43044
Geoffrey Mo (Caltech/Carnegie), Tomas Ahumada (NOIRLab), Benjamin Schneider (LAM), Viraj Karambelkar (Columbia), Robert Stein (UMD), Danielle Frostig (CfA), Nathan Lourie (MIT), Robert Simcoe (MIT), and Mansi Kasliwal (Caltech) report:
We observed the field of GRB 251205A (Lanava et al., GCN 43005; Beardmore et al., GCN 43007; Dichiara et al., GCN 43017; Krimm et al., GCN 43018) in the near-infrared J band with the Palomar 1-m telescope, equipped with the 1.2-square degree WINTER camera (Lourie et al. 2020, Frostig et al. 2024).
Observations began at 2025-12-06T10:27:54 UTC in the J band (~10.8 hours after the GRB trigger), consisting of 15 x 120 s exposures.The images were processed using the WINTER data reduction pipeline implemented with mirar (https://github.com/winter-telescope/mirar, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13352565).
We detect a source at the optical counterpart location (Lipunov et al., GCN 43004; Lanava et al., GCN 43005; Lipunov et al., GCN 43006; de Ugarte Postigo et al., GCN 43008; Malesani et al., GCN 43009; O’Neill et al., GCN 43010; Mandarakas et al., GCN 43011; Pankov et al., GCN 43012; Bochenek et al., GCN 43015; Klinger et al., GCN 43016; Patil et al., GCN 43019; Pérez-Fournon et al., GCN 43020; Bochenek et al., GCN 43024; Busmann et al., GCN 43026; Hagio et al., GCN 43029; Bochenek et al., GCN 43038), with magnitude J = 17.9 ± 0.1 mag (AB).
WINTER (Wide-field INfrared Transient ExploreR) is a partnership between MIT and Caltech, housed at Palomar Observatory, and funded by NSF MRI, NSF AAG, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.