Stars hidden by asteroids, on paths across India
An asteroid too small to see passes in front of a star, and its shadow — exactly as wide as the asteroid — races across the Earth. Inside that band the star blinks out for a few seconds; a few kilometres outside it, nothing happens. Each card maps the path and says how close it comes to you; open one for the map, the finder chart and the path to drive to.
72 asteroid occultations cross India at night this month · 3 pass over New Delhi (inside the path or within its 1σ margin)
Times in IST, for the moment the shadow passes closest to you. A night runs from noon to noon. On each map the shaded band is the path and the dot is you.
A card turns green when you are inside the predicted path and amber when you are outside it but within its 1σ uncertainty — a miss is still likely then, but a chord from the edge is the most valuable observation of all. The drop is how much fainter the star and asteroid together get while the star is hidden; under half a magnitude needs a camera. Up to is the longest the star can vanish, on the centre line.
| Asteroids | the 4,511 with a diameter of 15 km or more |
| Stars | Gaia DR3, magnitude G 12.5 and brighter |
| Listed when | the path passes within 100 km of one of the site's Indian cities with the star at least 10° up and the Sun at least 6° below the horizon; the path is at least as wide as its 1σ uncertainty; and the star fades by 0.1 mag or more (0.05 for events over 10 s) for at least 0.3 s |
| This month | 4,134 shadows touch the Earth somewhere; 72 are listed |
Orbits are JPL's (JPL SBDB, fetched 2026-09-15), carried to the date with the DE431 ephemeris, the four largest asteroids and the Sun's relativistic pull; stars are Gaia DR3 to G 12.5, carried to the date with their proper motion and parallax. The asteroid is treated as a sphere of its catalogue diameter: a real, lumpy asteroid casts a shadow that can be narrower or wider, which is exactly what observations along the path measure. The 1σ lines combine the star's Gaia uncertainty with the orbit's: the largest of JPL's formal uncertainty, the gap between JPL's and the Minor Planet Center's orbits for that event (divided by √2), and 10 mas — about how far independent orbit solutions for these asteroids disagree. A RUWE badge marks a star Gaia finds hard to fit — often a close double, whose fade may come in steps.