LIGO/Virgo GW150914

A. J. Castro-Tirado (IAA-CSIC Granada & ISA-UMA M��laga), J. C. Tello, R. Cunniffe, S. R. Oates, B.-B. Zhang, S. Jeong (IAA-CSIC Granada), A. Castell��n (Univ. of M��laga), M. Jelinek (ASU-CAS Ondrejov), N. Rattenbury and Ph. Yock (Univ. of Auckland) and R. Querel (NIWA, Lauder) report:

A search of the CASANDRA-3 allsky camera database at the BOOTES-3 astronomical station in Lauder (New Zealand), reveals a series of 36s images taken during the night of the LIGO/Virgo alert, covering the entire southern sky error-box.

In particular, amongst the hundreds of exposures, there is one starting at 09:50:22 UT that is contemporaneous to the LIGO/Virgo GW150914 event. Although a detailed investigation is ongoing, a limit of ~5th magnitude (due to poor weather conditions) is obtained for any optical transient
within that error box.

[GCN OPS NOTE(18feb16):  Per author's request, RC was added to the author list.]

A. Cwiek (NCBJ), A. F. Zarnecki (UW), A. Mankiewicz (CFT PAS), A. Zadrozny (NCBJ) on behalf of the Pi of the Sky

Pi of the Sky telescope surveyed whole sky visible from San Pedro de Atacama Observatory during each night (that weather permitted) of last days of September 2015 (26th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th) and October 2015, that also included an area of GW150914 (12 days after the alert). Data was searched for slowly fading bright optical transients visible to the instrument that might be connected to GW150914. All of the objects visible to us were previously observed. Data analysis showed that it is unlikely to have an slowly fading optical transient. We have performed our observations using two cameras, both observing same field, one using R filter and second using only IR-cut filter. For each field, the telescope has made three 10 s exposures.  During Observations have limiting brightness between 11mag-11.5mag. 


This email is send in case this analysis might be useful for any future purposes.