GCN Circular 43915

Geoffrey Mo (Caltech/Carnegie), Benjamin Schneider (LAM), Tomas Ahumada (NOIRLab), Robert Stein (UMD), Viraj Karambelkar (Columbia), Danielle Frostig (CfA), Nathan Lourie (MIT), Robert Simcoe (MIT), and Mansi Kasliwal (Caltech) report:

We observed the field of GRB 260303A (Wang et al., GCN 43901

) 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 2026-03-03T06:53:36 UTC in the J band (~52 min 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 do not detect a source at the optical counterpart location (Schneider et al., GCN 43902

). We obtain the following 5-sigma upper limit: J = 19.2 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.