LOTIS, Super-LOTIS, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and Tautenburg Observations of GRB 010921

We present multi-instrument optical observations of the High Energy TransientExplorer (HETE-2)/Interplanetary Network (IPN) error box of GRB 010921. Thisevent was the first gamma ray burst (GRB) localized by HETE-2 which hasresulted in the detection of an optical afterglow. In this paper we report theearliest known observations of the GRB010921 field, taken with the 0.11-mLivermore Optical Transient Imaging System (LOTIS) telescope, and the earliestknown detection of the GRB010921 optical afterglow, using the 0.5-m SloanDigital Sky Survey Photometric Telescope (SDSS PT). Observations with the LOTIStelescope began during a routine sky patrol 52 minutes after the burst.Observations were made with the SDSS PT, the 0.6-m Super-LOTIS telescope, andthe 1.34-m Tautenburg Schmidt telescope at 21.3, 21.8, and 37.5 hours after theGRB, respectively. In addition, the host galaxy was observed with the USNOFS1.0-m telescope 56 days after the burst. We find that at later times (t > 1 dayafter the burst), the optical afterglow exhibited a power-law decline with aslope of $\alpha = 1.75 \pm 0.28$. However, our earliest observations show thatthis power-law decline can not have extended to early times (t < 0.035 day).Comment: AASTeX v5.x LaTeX 2e, 6 pages with 2 postscript figures, will be submitted to ApJ Letter