GCN 44032: EP260316a: Xinglong optical upper limit

2026-03-16T17:46:14.945Z | rev 0 | event: EP260316a
Junbo-Zhang (NAOC),  Junjie-Jin (NAOC), Haiyang-Mu (NAOC), Feng-Xiao (NAOC), Yuguang-Sun (NAOC), Jie-Zheng (NAOC), Dong-Xu (NAOC), Zhou-Fan (NAOC), Hong-Wu (NAOC) report on behalf of a large collaboration:

Following the detection of EP260316a by EP-WXT (Jiang et al., GCN 44027), we observed the field of EP260316a using the 2.16-m telescope at Xinglong Observatory, NAOC. We obtained 6x300s clear-band frames with a median time of 2026-03-16 16:18:40 (UT), 3.76 hr after the EP trigger. 

No uncatalogued optical transient is detected in the stacked images within the 3 arcmin EP/WXT error circle (Jiang et al., GCN 44027), down to 3-sigma limiting magnitudes of g ~22.00 mag, calibrated with Pan-STARRS sources in the field. Also there is no apparent brightening for the catalogued sources within the error circle. 

We also detected no optical transient candidate with a median time of 2026-03-16T16:37:50.536 (UT) with the 0.8-m Telescope in Xinglong, Hebei, China. The upper limit is ～19.9 mag in the g-band.