Violent optical activity of the blazar OJ287

Astronomer’s Telegram #9650

V. Larionov, A. A. Mokrushina and T. S. Grishina

We perform optical photometric and polarimetric monitoring of a sample of gamma-bright blazars using 0.7-m AZT-8 telescope (Crimean Astrophysical Observatory) and 0.4-m LX-200 telescope (St.Petersburg), as a part of WEBT/GASP project. Confirming X-ray and UV Swift data reported in ATel#9629 , we report that OJ 287 reached R=12.96 in the night of 2016 October 18, TJD 57680.64. This is the highest value that we observed during our monitoring of this blazar since 2002. R band light curve for OJ 287 can be seen on our web-page.