TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER:  5857
SUBJECT: GRB 061126: Faulkes Telescope North Optical Observations
DATE:    06/11/26 09:57:27 GMT
FROM:    David Bersier at Liverpool John Moores U  <dfb@astro.livjm.ac.uk>

R. Smith, A. Melandri, (Liverpool JMU), A. Gomboc (Ljubljana),
D. Bersier (Liverpool JMU) report on behalf of the RoboNet GRB
collaboration

The 2-m Faulkes North Telescope (Hawaii) automatically reacted to the
Swift burst GRB061126 (trigger=240766, Sbarufatti et al. GCN 5854).
Observations started about 4.3 min after the trigger time. We report
the detection of the optical counterpart at the position

RA(J2000)  =  05:46:24.43
Dec(J2000) = +64:12:39.00

The automatic pipeline LT-TRAP identified a fading afterglow in BVRi'
filters, and we estimate an initial magnitude (10 second integration)
R = 15.97 +/- 0.05 (wrt USNOB) at t=4.30 min.

From the first 30 minutes of observations, a temporal decay index of
alpha ~ 1.0 has been measured.

Further observations and analysis are ongoing.