Looking for fast optical bursts from FRB121102: case study for a small telescopes with sub-second temporal resolution

Abstract

To assess the potential of a small telescopes for a high temporal resolution astrophysics, we observed the field of FRB~121102 repeating source of fast radio bursts on a 50-cm D50 telescope of Ond\v{r}ejov observatory, equipped with a fast frame rate EMCCD detector. In a three nights of observations we did not detect any optical flares from the source, which allows us to place an upper limit of 10 mJy for a brightness of possible fast optical events on a time scale of 10 ms. We also characterize the apparent brightness stability of a field stars on the same time scale in order to investigate the potential of such telescopes for detecting faint optical variability on a sub-second time scales.