Optical follow-up of MAXI J1803-298

ATel #14594; R. Hosokawa, K. L. Murata, M. Niwano, N. Ito, H. Takamatsu, Y. Imai, S. Sato, M. Takaku, R. Noto, R. Yamaguchi, Y. Yatsu, and N. Kawai (TokyoTech) report on behalf of the MITSuME collaboration
on 3 May 2021; 08:11 UT
Credential Certification: Katsuhiro Murata (murata@hp.phys.titech.ac.jp)

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We report on optical observation of the newly discovered transient MAXI J1803-298 (ATel #14587, #14588, #14591, GCN Circular 29924, 29925, 29926). Following the Swift/BAT trigger (trigger=1046414, GCN Circular 29925) related to MAXI J1803-298, we observed the field with the optical three color (g', Rc, and Ic) CCD cameras attached to the MITSuME 50 cm telescope of Okayama Astrophysical Observatory, Okayama, Japan. The observation with a series of 60 sec exposures started at 2021-05-02 17:56:06 UT. We marginally detected a source in Rc and Ic band at the position of the optical counterpart candidate identified by Swift/UVOT (ATel #14591, GCN Circular 29925). We performed forced photometry and obtained the preliminary magnitudes as follows: Rc=15.9+/-0.4, Ic=15.6+/-0.4 on 2020-05-02 (MJD 59336.77509). We used the PS1 catalog for flux calibration. The magnitudes are expressed in the AB system. The images were processed in real-time through the MITSuME GPU reduction pipeline (Niwano et al. 2021, PASJ, Vol.73, Issue 1, Pages 4-24; https://github.com/MNiwano/Eclaire). We will continue simultaneous multi-color observation with the MITSuME 50cm telescope.