Congratulations go out to Tilan Ukwatta of George Washington University and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (and also a member of the Swift team) for successfully imaging the visible light afterglow of Gamma Ray Burst 100901A. Tilan used LB-0001 on September 2nd, 2010 to capture the GRB with the R filter approximately 17.5 hours after Swift detected the event. With just 60 seconds of integration time per subframe he was easily able to capture the 18th magnitude glow on the 9/2 and the 19th magnitude glow on 9/3. We're looking forward to more great results from Tilan, the rest of the Swift team, and everyone else interested in doing research with LightBuckets.

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TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER: 11198
SUBJECT: GRB 100901A: Lightbuckets Optical Observations
DATE: 10/09/03 20:02:34 GMT
FROM: Tilan Ukwatta at GSFC/GWU

T. N. Ukwatta (GWU/GSFC), T. Sakamoto (GSFC/UMBC), N. Gehrels (GSFC),
and K. S. Dhuga (GWU)

We observed the Swift GRB 100901A (Immler et al., GCN 11159)
with the Lightbuckets 0.61m rental telescope LB-0001 in Rodeo, NM,
USA. Under good weather conditions, observations were carried out in
the R filter starting Sep. 02 (UT) 07:05 (~ 17.5 hours after
the GRB trigger) and a followup observation was performed on
Sep. 03 (UT) 07:01 under acceptable weather conditions.

The burst afterglow is clearly detected with a R magnitude of ~18.05
in the first observation. The afterglow, not corrected for Galactic
extinction, is calibrated against the USNO-B1.0 R1 mag catalog.

Time after trigger Exposure (s) R Magnitude

17.5 hours (0.7 days) 3 x 60 ~ 18.05
41 hours (1.7 days) 10 x 60 > 19.1


We acknowledge the helpful assistance of the Lightbuckets staff, in
particular LightBuckets CEO Stephen G. Cullen.