The Virgo Full Moon peaks at 1:08 pm EDT Sunday with a chance to learn something you didn’t know. What you don’t know is not necessarily something that’s hidden. The revelation of what has been hidden corresponds more to Mercury retrogrades. In contrast, Sunday’s opposition from the Pisces Sun to the Virgo Moon feels more like learning another side of a story you already know in part.
What gives Sunday’s Virgo Full Moon the feeling of learning something about a story’s other side has to do with how the Pisces Sun will be precisely conjoined with distant Salacia (more properly, 120347 Salacia).
Salacia is one of those sizable objects out past Neptune nobody knew about for 62 years after Pluto’s 1930 discovery. Then, two young astronomers (Jane X. Luu and David Jewitt) decided to check out the the other side of astronomy’s story about Pluto being out there alone. What Dr. Luu and Dr. Jewitt found was 1992 QB1, the still-unnamed object that opened the floodgates to a long list of discoveries in what is now known as the Kuiper Belt.
Salacia (which will reach the 10th anniversary of its first observation this year on the Libra Equinox) is among those distant objects we didn’t know about in the Kuiper Belt, and beyond to the “scattered disc” where leftovers from our solar system’s formation orbit at the outer edges of the Sun’s gravitational field.