TITLE: GCN GRB OBSERVATION REPORT NUMBER: 3900 SUBJECT: GRB 050827: Optical Limit DATE: 05/08/28 20:04:21 GMT FROM: Jules Halpern at Columbia U. J. P. Halpern (Columbia U.) reports on behalf of the MDM Observatory GRB follow-up team: "I observed the error box of GRB 050827 (Swift trigger #152325, GCN #3893) in the R band with the MDM 1.3m telescope for 50 minutes starting on Aug. 28 09:32 UT, or 14.6 hours after the burst. There is no optical object to a limiting magnitude R=23.5 within 16", or twice the error circle radius, of the XRT candidate afterglow reported by Capalbi et al. (GCN #3899). Even after correcting this limit for Galactic absorption A(R)=1.47 mag at its location (Schlegel et al. 1988), it would be unusual for a persistent X-ray source of flux 1.0E-12 erg cm^-2 s^-1 to have no optical counterpart. So this supports the identification of the X-ray source as the GRB afterglow."