© Nasa/JPL2011 GP59 orbit.
Amateur astronomers across the world have fallen for a cheeky asteroid that passed the Earth on Monday night.
Asteroid 2011 GP59 was caught winking at our planet from a distance away barely 10 times that of the moon.
The "winking" bit which is getting spacefans so hot and bothered stems from the fact that the asteroid is cigar-shaped and spinning madly end-to-end, comparatively speaking.
"Usually, when we see an asteroid strobe on and off like that, it means that the body is elongated and we are viewing it broadside along its long axis first, and then on its narrow end as it rotates," said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
"GP59 is approximately 50m long, and we think its period of rotation is about seven-and-a-half minutes.
"This makes the object's brightness change every four minutes or so."