TITLE: GCN GRB OBSERVATION REPORT NUMBER: 4072 SUBJECT: GRB 051008, optical observations DATE: 05/10/08 18:53:12 GMT FROM: Sylvio Klose at TLS Tautenburg S. Klose and C. Hoegner, Thueringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg report: We observed the error circle of GRB 051008 with the Tautenburg Schmidt telescope. I-band observations started 17:31 UT, i.e. 1 hr after the burst. R-band observations followed at 17:57 UT. A first inspection of the images does not reveal an afterglow candidate, neither in the R band nor in the I band down to the DSS2 red limit. A bright star in the field affects the observations a bit but we exclude a bright afterglow as close as 20 arcsec to this star. The bright afterglow candidate reported by Roming et al. (GCN 4070) is visible on our images, of course. Even though, this source is also visible on the DSS2-red so that its identification as the afterglow is not yet obvious. We cannot exclude, however, that there was a bright object very close to this star that faded away.