TITLE: GCN CIRCULAR NUMBER: 9 SUBJECT: Untitled DATE: 70/01/01 00:00:00 GMT FROM: circulars@gcn.nasa.gov Optical Observations of GRB 971214 at Keck #009 S. R. Kulkarni (CIT), J. S. Bloom (CIT), D. A. Frail (NRAO), R. Goodrich (CARA), and A. N. Ramaprakash (CIT) report on behalf of the Caltech GRB collaboration: "We have obtained a series R- and I-band images of the SAX localization (IAUC 6787) of GRB 971214 using the LRIS instrument on the Keck II 10-m telescope on the nights of Dec 16 and Dec 17, 1997 UT. The OT reported by Halpern et al. (IAUC 6788) appears to have faded by about 0.5 magnitude with respect to two nearby faint stars over a 24-hour interval between UT Dec 16, 1997 and UT Dec 17, 1997. We note that Diercks et al. (GCN email) report a faster fading rate but in the R-band. We caution our results are preliminary. Pending a more thorough analysis of the photometry we request that the above photometric information not be cited. The OT is very well detected on Dec 16, 1997. The photometric precision is 0.7%. The seeing during the first epoch I-band images was ~0.65 arcsec (FWHM) and the OT appears completely consistent with a point source (similar to that of GRB 970508). Two extended galaxies are found within a radius of 5-arcsecond of the OT. The seeing during the second epoch is comparbly good."