I really don’t have the patience to go out and stare at the night sky for very long, which is why I so appreciate it when brilliant people who follow the paths of planets, stars and asteroids tell us that something highly unusual is going to happen and then it does – right down to the second!

Early Thursday morning, March 20, the distant (78 light years away) star Regulus will be briefly obscured for sky watchers in parts of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Eastern Canada by the passage overhead of an asteroid named Erigone, pronounced (air-RIG-oh-knee).

Is this a big, jaw-dropping kind of space event, like a solar eclipse or an incandescent alien swarm of interstellar bees engulfing the moon and setting it on fire?

No! But it is quite rare. Rare enough so that maps have been published and in the nation’s most populous area serious people are thinking about staying up until 2 am to see a tiny light in the sky not be there for about 14 seconds, and then come back.

Simple pleasures are the best.

Pleasures as simple as a familiar nursery rhyme, re-cast as a conversation between an Earthbound observer and a distant light.

How appropriate that each verse, when sung sweetly, lasts exactly as long as Regulus will be invisible.

Regulus, so far away,
Spotted you towards break of day.
You’re a bright but tiny dude.
Star of the first magnitude!
Regulus, intense and proud.
Shiny, showy, sharp and loud.

Twinkle Twinkle, little star.
Resurrected! There you are.
Thought I lost you for a time.
Just a verse within this rhyme.
That was much too long, I think.
Twinkle, winkle, twinkle, wink.

Some people, Hollywood stars, mostly, can pull off a wink and make it seem sexy. When I wink it just looks like I’ve got something stuck in my eye, which is why I never do it.

What makes a wink work?