You’re not drunk, the stars really are going to wink at you early Thursday morning.
The asteroid Erigone will eclipse the star Regulus (one of the sky’s brightest stars) at 2:06 a.m. on Thursday, causing the star to vanish from view for about 14 seconds. This “asteroid occultation” is one of the brightest ever predicted, according to Alan MacRobert at Sky & Telescope. In fact, it will be so bright that you won’t even need a telescope, it will be visible from the naked eye–if the weather cooperates, that is.
“The cool thing about this is if enough people observe this and time when the star disappears and reappears … then you can actually reconstruct a silhouette of an asteroid that gives it a size and shape,” MacRobert said. “There is no other way to do this precisely other than send a spacecraft.”
A guide to the sky wink is below.
