TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER:  43903
SUBJECT: EP260302a: BOOTES-7 optical counterpart detection at early times
DATE:    26/03/03 08:37:18 GMT
FROM:    I. Perez-Garcia at Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia <ipg@iaa.es>

I. Pérez-García, S.-Y. Wu, E. Fernandez-García, M. D. Caballero-García, M. Gritsevich, R. Sánchez-Ramírez, S. Guziy and A. J. Castro-Tirado (IAA-CSIC, Granada), C. Pérez del Pulgar (Univ. de Málaga), Y.-D. Hu (GXU), D. R. Xiong (Yunnan Observatories of CAS), B.-B. Zhang (Nanjing Univ.) and A. Maury (Space, San Pedro de Atacama), on behalf of a larger collaboration, report:

Following the detection of the fast X-ray transient EP260302a by the Einstein Probe (Zhang et al. GCN 42899), the 0.6m BOOTES-7 robotic telescope at San Pedro de Atacama (Chile) observed the fast X-ray transient location starting on Mar 3, 00:04:05 UT (11.1 min after trigger) in different optical bands. On a coadd of clear-filter images (4x60s, 00:10:26 UT, mid exposure time) we detect at early times the optical counterpart reported by LCO 1 hr after the trigger (Li et al. GCN 43898), within the EP/FXT 20 arcsec radius error circle, with 19.1 +/- 0.2 mag.

We thank the staff at San Pedro de Atacama Celestial Explorations observatory for their excellent support.