TITLE: GCN GRB OBSERVATION REPORT NUMBER: 3646 SUBJECT: GRB 050712, Tautenburg optical afterglow observations DATE: 05/07/19 16:22:14 GMT FROM: Andreas Zeh at TLS Tautenburg A. Zeh, D. A. Kann, S. Klose (Thueringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg, Germany), A. Manning, C. Riddle (Clemson University, SC, USA), report: We observed the field of GRB 050712 (Grupe et al. 2005, GCN 3573) with the Tautenburg 1.34m Schmidt telescope in the R filter at two epochs. The first set of observations consisted of 10 x 30 second exposures, mid-exposure time UT 050712.937, i.e. 0.353 days after the GRB. The second set of observations consisted of 20 x 30 second exposures, mid-exposure time UT 050713.948, i.e. 1.364 days after the burst. A comparison of our combined first epoch image with our deeper second epoch image shows that the potential optical counterpart of the afterglow (Zeh et al. 2005, GCN 3587) has faded away. Thus, we confirm the earlier report by Rol et al. (2005, GCN 3575) that the source at coordinates RA, DEC (J2000) = 5:10:48.1, +64:54:47.6 is the optical counterpart of the X-ray afterglow (Falcone et al. 2005, GCN 3574; Grupe et al. 2005, GCN 3579). Assuming R = 15.8 for the USNO-A2.0 star U1500_0409875 at RA, DEC (J2000) = 05:11:10.51, +64:55:36.0 (Maiorano et al. 2005, GCN 3601), we find the following magnitudes for the GRB 050712 afterglow: UT mid t-t_0 (days) mag_Rc 12.937 0.353 20.7 +/- 0.4 13.948 1.364 > 21.5 We find that the decay slope alpha is about 1.2 using the data point by Maiorano et al. (2005, GCN 3601). This message may be cited.