A lighthouse on the shore shines steadily until the wind blows smoke from a campfire across it. The light fades, though the flame itself is intact. That's what happened to the star WR 59 in the constellation Centaurus: within a few hours it became three times dimmer, and after two weeks it shone as brightly as before.
Rod Stubbings from Australia was the first to notice. His high-magnification telescope split WR 59 from a nearby bright star that sits very close to it in the sky. Automated telescopes see them as a single blob and miss the dimming of one star. But a human eye with a good eyepiece caught the difference. Later, the TESS space telescope, which happened to be looking in the same direction, confirmed that the star had indeed faded.
WR 59 was previously thought to be a quiet star. Now it's clear that it periodically hides behind clouds of its own dust, like a lighthouse behind smoke. Stubbings continues to monitor it and has already seen ten more such dimming events. So an amateur with a telescope can spot what large sky surveys miss.
During the minimum, WR 59 became almost 3.3 times fainter than usual, but it would still remain invisible to the naked eye: at magnitude 15.2, it is 4000 times fainter than the faintest stars visible to the eye on a dark sky.