GRB 000812

K. Hurley, on behalf of the Ulysses GRB team, T. Cline, on behalf of
the Konus-Wind and NEAR GRB teams, and E. Mazets and S. Golenetskii,
on behalf of the Konus-Wind GRB team, report:

Ulysses, Konus-Wind, and NEAR observed this burst at 70782 s.
As observed by Ulysses, it had a duration ~80 s, a 25-100 keV
fluence of ~2x10^-5 erg/cm^2, and a peak flux over 0.25 s of
~6.5x10^-7 erg/cm^2 s.  We have triangulated it to a preliminary,
3 sigma error box whose area is ~100 sq. arcmin. and whose
coordinates are:

    RA(2000)                 DEC(2000)
 18 h  8 m 43.68 s     45 o 50 '  47.28 "  (CENTER)
 18 h  8 m 28.29 s     45 o 53 '  43.56 "  (CORNER)
 18 h  8 m 37.97 s     45 o 32 '  25.73 "  (CORNER)
 18 h  8 m 50.13 s     46 o  9 '   8.88 "  (CORNER)
 18 h  8 m 59.07 s     45 o 47 '  51.20 "  (CORNER)



This localization may be improved.

D. A. Frail (NRAO), E. Berger, A. Diercks and R. Gal (Caltech) report:

"A short VLA observation was made of the central 10 arcminutes of the
IPN error box for GRB 000812 (GCN #770
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 ) on 2000 August 15.44 UT. At a
wavelength of 6-cm we detected an uncatalogued source with a flux
density of approximately 1 mJy. The position of this source is r.a.=
18:08:49.33 (+/-0.36s), dec.=+45:46:56.5 (+/-2.5"). We will continue
to monitor this source to determine whether it is the afterglow of GRB
000812.  There are no objects in the DPOSS images within the 2.5"
error radius of the radio source, with typical limiting magnitudes of
Bj=22.5, Rf=20.8, In=19.5."

N. Masetti, E. Palazzi (ITESRE, CNR, Bologna), E. Pian (OATs, Trieste), 
R. Cosentino, F. Ghinassi, A. Magazzu', S. Benetti, (TNG), on behalf 
of a larger collaboration, report:


"We acquired optical R-band images of the central part of the GRB000812
error box (Hurley et al., GCN #770
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 ) on 2000 August 16.961 UT with
TNG+Dolores for a total exposure time of 30 minutes. Seeing was 1.1 arcsec.
The pointing was centered on the uncatalogued radio source found by Frail
et al. (GCN #771
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 ).
The observations were heavily hampered by the full moon and by a 8th
magnitude star located ~40 arcsec from the radio position; nevertheless,
they were considerably deeper than the DSS-II.

Photometric calibration was performed using USNO-A2.0 catalog stars.
No new object brighter than the DSS-II limit is apparent all over the
image. Also, no object down to a 3-sigma limiting magnitude R ~ 23 
is present inside the radio source error box.".


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