TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR NUMBER: 16731 SUBJECT: GRB 140817A: NOT optical observations DATE: 14/08/21 16:01:53 GMT FROM: Daniele Malesani at Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Inst Daniele Malesani (DARK/NBI), Jyri Lehtinen (Univ. Helsinki), and Pall Jakobsson (Univ. Iceland), report on behalf of a larger collaboration: We observed the field of GRB 140817A (Sbarufatti et al., GCN 16695) with the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) equipped with the AlFOSC camera. Observations were carried out starting on 2014 Aug 20.23 UT (2.94 days after the GRB), at high airmass and in twilight, for a total exposure of 15 min. No source is detected at the position of the UVOT optical afterglow (Marshall & Sbarufatti, GCN 16710) nor within the XRT error circle (Sbarufatti, GCN 16696; Osborne et al., GCN 16697) down to a 3-sigma limiting magnitude of R = 21 (calibrated against the USNO-B1.0 catalog). The galaxy MCG +10-12-141 at z ~ 0.018, around 1 arcmin away of the XRT position, is well detected in our images (Cummings & Page, GCN 16698). We note that a supernova similar to SN 1998bw would have R ~ 17.5 at z = 0.018 at a comparable epoch. We thus disfavor the association of GRB 140817A with the nearby galaxy.