GRB 241217A/EP241217b: continued SOAR observations

We observed the location of the optical counterpart (Qiu et al., GCN 38600) to SVOM GRB 241217A / EP241217b (Brunet et al., GCN 38594; William et al., GCN 38599; Zhou et al., GCN 38606), with the Goodman High Throughput Spectrograph mounted on the SOAR telescope in imaging mode. We took six 300s exposures in r-band between 2024-12-24T04:43:11 and 2024-12-24T05:14:22 UTC. With difference imaging using a template from the Dark Energy Survey (Abbott et al., 2021, ApJ, 255, 20) and photometric calibration using the Pan-STARRS1 catalogue, we do not detect the optical counterpart and place an upper limit of r > 24.5 AB magnitude.