TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR NUMBER: 8048 SUBJECT: GRB 080727A: Early IR observations DATE: 08/07/29 15:12:05 GMT FROM: Andrew Levan at U.of Leicester A.J. Levan (U. Warwick) and K. Wiersema (U. Leicester) report for a larger collaboration: We observed the location of GRB 080727A (Immler et al. GCN 8021) using UKIRT. A series of K-band exposures were taken beginning at 06:24:51 UT, roughly 30 minutes after the burst, a total of 720s of observtions were taken (36x20s). We find no evidence for any source within the XRT error circle (Evans et al. GCN 8025) for GRB 080727A, down to a limit of K=19.8 mag (3-sigma). Comparing this limit to the extrapolated X-ray flux 30 minutes post-burst implies that the observed X-ray to optical/IR spectral slope was beta_KX < ~0.8, thus the non-detection in the IR is likely down to the rapid fading of the afterglow, rather than suppression of the optical/IR flux. We thank the staff of UKIRT for their rapid response to these alerts.