1 Introduction

On 1997 27 December, 08:43:59.99 UT a gamma ray burst was detected by BATSE (Woods et al. 1997) and by BeppoSAX GRBM and WFC unit 2 (Coletta et al. 1997). The duration of the event was about 7 s and the peak flux measured by BATSE was ($3.3\pm0.2$) photons cm^-2 s^-1. The total fluence (over 7 s) was $(9.3\,\pm\,1.4)\ 10^{-7}$ erg cm^-2 s^-1 in the (20-300) keV energy band and no signal has been detected above 300 keV. It was localized in the WFC2 field of view and imaged with BeppoSAX Narrow Field Instruments about 14 hours after the burst. This observation shows a faint X-Ray source visible in the first 11600 s of the observation only. The "Original'' BATSE error box was observed by the Livermore Optical Transient Imaging System (LOTIS) about 14 s after the burst but the analysis of LOTIS images does not show any optical transient within the BeppoSAX WFC error box brighter than R=14.2 mag (Park 1997; Williams et al. 1999). The BeppoSAX WFC error box was imaged by many ground based telescopes. A claim of a detection came from an image taken at the 2.2 m CAHA telescope. They observed the GRB field about 13.7 hours after the burst and detected a source with R=19.5 mag (Castro-Tirado et al. 1997) within the 1.5' BeppoSAX NFI error circle (Piro et al. 1997). Further observations in the optical band did not show any significantly detection (Castro-Tirado et al. 1997; Groot et al. 1997; Ramaprakash et al. 1997; Bartolini et al. 1997, 1999). Deep images taken with the Keck-II about 3 and 5 days after the burst did not show any object brighter than R=23 mag showing significantly variation by more than 0.2 mag.