GCN Circular 5869
Subject
GRB 061126: Early Super-LOTIS Observations
Date
2006-11-27T04:21:25Z (17 years ago)
From
Grant Williams at Steward Observatory <ggwilli@mmto.org>
G. G. Williams (MMTO) and P. A. Milne (Steward Observatory), on behalf of
the Super-LOTIS Collaboration, report:
The robotic 0.6-m Super-LOTIS telescope began observing the error box of
GRB 061126 (Swift Trigger 240766, Sbarufatti et al. GCN 5854) at
08:48:30.7 UT, 35 seconds after the trigger. Our initial observations
include 5 x 10s exposures, 5 x 20s exposures, and 30 x 60s exposures, all
in the R-band.
Observations were hampered by high winds; most of the images are elongated
as a result of wind buffeting. Despite the poor image quality we clearly
detect the bright optical afterglow first reported by Vanden Berk (GCN
5856) in all our early images.
Using the single USNO-B1.0 star at RA=05:46:31.61, Dec=+64:11:59.7 with
R2MAG=12.80, we estimate the following R-band magnitude for the OT using
circular aperture photometry (despite elongated images):
t_start (UT) exp t (s) t_start-t_0 (s) R Mag
----------------------------------------------------------------
08:48:30.7 10.0 35 R = 12.93 +/- 0.2
Because of the elongated PSF the error bar is a conservative estimate.
Continued analysis is underway.