Speaker
Description
We used the 0.4318 m ground-based telescope at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s Dr. Cristina V. Torres Memorial Astronomical Observatory (CTMO) located in Resaca de la Palma State Park in Brownsville, Texas. The CTMO telescope is an f/6.8 CDK17 astrograph manufactured by PlaneWave. We used an FLI ProLine CCD with no filter. On the night of 2024 June 16, CTMO pursued a short gamma-ray burst GRB240615a via optical observational methods. All observations were 60 second exposures set at 10°C and binned in 1 x 1 mode. Information regarding the transient, such as its coordinates, was provided through the NASA GCN alert system. A GCN circular for GRB240615a was released when the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) was triggered on 2024 June 15 at 17:51:45 UT. We followed-up the alert provided by Swift-BAT GUANO. Data reduction and photometry was performed by Python scripts and catalog cross-matching by ds9. We did not observe GRB240615 in the optical spectrum using the CTMO telescope.
