[sgcullen]

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. Attached is part of Tilan's confirmation image. The Red circle represents the Swift BAT error circle and blue circle represents the Swift UVOT error circle.

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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 <tilan.ukwatta@gmail.com>

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.