TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER:  44444
SUBJECT: EP260502a: BOOTES-7 observations of a fading catalogued source close to the X-ray position
DATE:    26/05/02 15:48:54 GMT
FROM:    I. Perez-Garcia at Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía <ipg@iaa.es>

S.-Y. Wu, I. Perez-Garcia, E. Fernandez-Garcia, M. D. Caballero-Garcia, R. Sanchez-Ramirez, S. Guziy, M. Gritsevich and A. J. Castro-Tirado (IAA-CSIC, Granada), C. Perez del Pulgar, A. Castellon, A. Reina (Univ. de Malaga),Y.-D. Hu (GXU), L. Hernandez-Garcia (Univ. de Valparaiso), 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:

Further to our previous report on EP260502a (Perez-Garcia et al., GCN 44442), and following a comment by D. B. Malesani, we have inspected the BOOTES-7 images at the position of a bright catalogued source close to the EP/FXT position, located at

RA(J2000)  = 18:09:07.01
Dec(J2000) = -76:13:26.79.

This source is reported as an eROSITA source and lies close to the boundary of the EP/WXT error region. Relative photometry of this source in the BOOTES-7 r'-band images shows a fading trend during the first observing sequence. In the 9 s r'-band exposures, the source faded from r' = 13.8 +/- 0.06 at 2026-05-02 06:24:42 UT to r' = 14.5 +/- 0.08 at 2026-05-02 06:57:36 UT, corresponding to a decline of 0.7 mag over ~30 min. No significant fading trend is observed in the BOOTES-7 i' and Z band images over the same time interval.

The final measured value is consistent with the archival SkyMapper magnitude of the source, r = 14.5.

We thank D. B. Malesani for pointing out this source.