TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR NUMBER: 5682 SUBJECT: GRB 060930: near-IR afterglow candidate DATE: 06/10/02 10:49:55 GMT FROM: Alberto Castro-Tirado at Inst.de Astro. de Andalucia A. de Ugarte Postigo, M. Jelinek, A.J. Castro-Tirado, J.Gorosabel (IAA-CSIC Granada), N. Pinilla-Alonso (TNG La Palma) J. de León Cruz (IAC Tenerife), J. Licandro (ING-IAC) on behalf of a larger collaboration report: We have observed the field of the GRB 060930 detected by INTEGRAL (Gotz et al., GCN 5665) with the 3.5m Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (+NICS) at La Palma in the JHK bands on 30 Sep 2006 (from 20:30 to 20:51 UT) and revisited the field in H band on 1 Oct 2006 (from 20:37 to 20:51 UT; i.e. 11.5 hr and 35.5 hr respectively after the onset of the gamma-ray event). The NICS frames cover the central 80% of the INTEGRAL/IBIS error box (2.5' radius). We detect a variable, stationary object at the following coordinates (J2000): RA = 20:18:11.51, Dec = -23:37:19.6 with an astrometric error of 0.5". In the first epoch the source is detected in all 3 bands and has an H band magnitude of ~18.2. In the second H band epoch it has faded by about 1 magnitude. This would imply a decay index of alpha -0.9 +/- 0.2 . For this object we obtain (Js-K)=1.10+/-0.22, consistent with the near-IR colour expected for a GRB afterglow (Gorosabel et al. 2002, A&A, 384, 11). A finding chart is available at: http://www.iaa.es/~deugarte/GRBs/060930/grb060930.gif This message is quotable.