TITLE:   GCN CIRCULAR
NUMBER:  15987
SUBJECT: GRB 140318A: NOT detection of the afterglow
DATE:    14/03/18 02:04:47 GMT
FROM:    Steve Schulze at U of Iceland  <sts30@hi.is>

S. Schulze (PUC and MCSS), T. Kruehler (ESO Chile), N. R. Tanvir (U Leicester),  A. A. Djupvik (NOT), and P. Jakobsson (U Iceland) report on behalf of a larger collaboration:

We observed the field of GRB 140318A (Cenko et al., GCN 15986) with 2.5m the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) equipped with StanCAM. We obtained 3 x 300 s in the R band. Observations started at 00:52:00 UT on March 18 (i.e. 43 min after the burst).

We detect a bright point source at the position

R.A.(J2000)  = 12:16:21.40
Dec. (J2000) = +20:12:31.9

We measure R = 19.7 +/- 0.1 mag at 45 min after the trigger. The object coincides with a faint galaxy in the SDSS catalog which we identify as the putative host galaxy.  SDSS J121621.38+201232.1 has a r'-band magnitude of 22.87 +/-0.26 mag(AB) and a photometric redshift of 0.42 +/- 0.02.