  We present the discovery of the Optical Transient (OT) of the long-duration
gamma-ray burst GRB000926. The optical transient was detected independently
with the Nordic Optical Telescope and at Calar Alto 22.2 hours after the burst.
At this time the magnitude of the transient was R = 19.36. The transient faded
with a decay slope of about 1.7 during the first two days after which the slope
increased abruptly (within a few hours) to about 2.4. The light-curve started
to flatten off after about a week indicating the presence of an underlying
extended object. This object was detected in a deep image obtained one month
after the GRB at R=23.87+-0.15 and consists of several compact knots within
about 5 arcsec. One of the knots is spatially coincident with the position of
the OT and hence most likely belongs to the host galaxy. Higher resolution
imaging is needed to resolve whether all the compact knots belong to the host
galaxy or to several independent objects. In a separate paper we present a
discussion of the optical spectrum of the OT, and its inferred redshift (Moller
et al. in prep.).
