On July 19, 1952, Palomar Observatory was undertaking a photographic survey of the night sky. Part of the project was to take multiple images of the same region of sky, to help identify things such as asteroids. At around 8:52 that evening a photographic plate captured the light of three stars clustered together. At a magnitude of 15, they were reasonably bright in the image. At 9:45 pm the same region of sky was captured again, but this time the three stars were nowhere to be seen. In less than an hour they had completely vanished.
Is there any confirmation that they were there before that point?
As OP did not seem to link to a write-up. (Or I failed at clicking…) https://phys.org/news/2023-10-group-stars-vanishedastronomers.html
The janitor was spotted with a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels during the interval between the photos.
Could they have been asteroids?
That was what they were looking for, after all.
Lost planet, obi wan has
How embarrassing, how embarrassing.
