TITLE: GCN GRB OBSERVATION REPORT NUMBER: 3564 SUBJECT: GRB 050626: Swift XRT observations DATE: 05/07/05 17:34:19 GMT FROM: David Burrows at PSU/Swift V. Mangano, T. Mineo, V. La Parola, G. Cusumano (INAF-IASF/Palermo), S. Hunsberger (PSU), D. Morris (PSU), A. Beardmore, K. Page (U. Leicester), P. Boyd (GSFC-UMBC), L. Angelini (GSFC-JHU) and D. N. Burrows (PSU) report on behalf of the Swift XRT team: Swift observed GRB 050626 (D. Gotz at al, GCN3552) with XRT in Photon Counting (PC) mode for three times starting between 2005-06-29 03:38:54 and 2005-07-01 12:10:42 and collected a total of 38.6 ks. (Observations were delayed by several days because the Integral source was initially located near the Swift orbital pole, and was within the Swift Earth avoidance angle.) The three observations were performed in manual state to avoid the automatic switching in Windowed Timing (WT) mode caused by the presence of two bright optical stars within 3 arcmin of the INTEGRAL position. Only one uncataloged X-ray source was detected within the INTEGRAL error circle, at RA(J2000) = 12h 27m 01.2s Dec(J2000) = -63:08:13.9, i.e. 20 arcsec from the INTEGRAL position. The count rate of this source has been found to be steady within errors at the average level of (1.6 +/- 0.4)E-3 counts/s, making it unlikely to be the X-ray afterglow of the GRB. No afterglow candidate was detected within the INTEGRAL error circle. We estimate 3 sigma upper limits of 7.9E-14, 6.6E-14, and 1.6E-13 erg cm-2 s-1 for the flux of the GRB afterglow in the first, second and third observations, respectively and a 3 sigma upper limit of 3.8E-14 erg cm-2 s-1 in the sum of the three observations.