By Len Wallick
If yesterday’s Full Moon in Libra was an occasion for reflection, today’s aspects may well be an indication that we should direct ourselves towards contemplation. Contemplation of thresholds. Since it is not the intent of this blog to engage in semantic discussion, please, for the moment, be open to your correspondent’s posit that reflection is the more passive and contemplation the more active and forward looking. Let us contemplate the intimations of three thresholds soon to be crossed.
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Today begins with the conjunction of Mercury and the slow-moving minor planet known as 1992 QB1 in the 25th degree of Aries. Perhaps the most distinguishing thing about 1991 QB1 is that it has not yet been assigned a name beyond the cryptic code that designates the year of its discovery, the type of object and the numeric order among others of the same classification. This despite the fact that many subsequently discovered bodies have received their monikers.
Perhaps this is because astronomers can place it into more than one group. It is an object in the Kuiper Belt, a huge ring of rocks and ice cubes in the region of Pluto that resembles the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter except that it’s about 20 times wider and at least 20 times more massive. It is also referred to as a trans-Neptunian object, which includes all the objects in the solar system that orbit the Sun at a greater average distance than Neptune. Finally, the “QB1” part of the name gave birth to a group of objects called cubewanos, defined as Kuiper Belt objects with orbits not controlled by the orbital resonances of Neptune.