TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR NUMBER: 23537 SUBJECT: GRB 181213A: NOT optical observations DATE: 18/12/14 10:01:41 GMT FROM: Kasper Elm Heintz at Univ. of Iceland and DAWN/NBI K. E. Heintz (Univ. of Iceland), D. B. Malesani (DAWN/NBI/DTU and DARK/NBI), J. P. U. Fynbo (DAWN/NBI/DTU), A. de Ugarte Postigo (HETH/IAA-CSIC and DARK/NBI), L. Balaguer-Nuñez, J. Carbajo (Dept. FQA, Univ. de Barcelona), F. Galindo and C. Perez (NOT), report on behalf of a larger collaboration: We observed the optical afterglow (Lipunov et al., GCN 23526; Hu et al., GCN 23527; Siegel et al., GCN 23529; Belkin et al., GCN 23530) of GRB 181213A (Evans et al., GCN 23525) with the 2.5-m Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) equipped with AlFOSC. Spectroscopy was secured: we obtained 4x900s exposures using grism 4 (with a wavelength coverage from 350 to 900 nm) starting at 23:27:14 UT on December 13 (i.e. 10.5 hr after trigger). The observations were obtained at a seeing around 1” but at an airmass > 3. From the acquisition image taken without filter we measure r = 20.6 +/- 0.2 AB mag, calibrated against SDSS r-band Pan-STARRS local photometry. The combined spectrum shows a low-S/N, mostly featureless continuum. Based on the detected continuum down to 415 nm we infer an upper limit on the redshift for the GRB of z < 2.4.