Charles Kowal, the discoverer of Chiron, broke decades of silence and said in an interview last week that “Chiron is not a planet.”
“It’s a comet, with a couple of tails and everything,” Kowal said, during a visit to Kingston, NY, where he gave an interview at Dominick’s Cafe there. “The fact that anyone thinks it’s a planet involves a 1978 article in The New York Times. The correction was run one week later, but nobody saw that.”
He said he thought it was strange that so many astrologers are intrigued “by this wayward little chip of ice.”
Zane Stein, who wrote the first book about Chiron and who was the first to possess an ephemeris for it, noted that Kowal has Chiron in the 12th house of his natal chart. “Of course he doesn’t understand why this is so meaningful. But wait till he has his second Chiron return in 2042. Then he’ll understand.”
Melanie Reinhart, reached by carrier pigeon in her cottage in the last bit of rural England, said in a message that “it doesn’t matter whether someone understands Chiron. We don’t want to be evangelists. If someone is ready, they shall understand.”
Reached in the Pleiades after her latest trip to Egypt, Barbara Hand Clow said, “Wait till Nibiru comes around. then you’ll wish Chiron was a planet.”
“Good evening,” she added.
The controversy over Chiron’s status as a planet follows a similar debate over Pluto, which the International Astronomical Union settled in the summer of 2006 by kicking Pluto out of the solar system.
The New Horizons mission to Pluto, launched in the summer of 2006, was delayed by a few weeks to include a message to Pluto informing it that it was no longer a planet. That message will arrive in 2015, and also send back the first ever clear images of Pluto and its moons that scientists have ever seen.
Eris, reached for comment in her summer home 22 astronomical units away from the Sun, said she was fine with neither Chiron nor Pluto being planets. “It’s all good,” she said. “Now you all have to deal with me.”
Photo of Neptune looks like a face… so beautiful, so blue.
New Reality: Home For Lunch.
Here are a couple of Pluto pieces. This is the one written after the IAU did its highly political, not quite scientifically grounded vote:
http://www.planetwavesweekly.com/resources/pluto_astrology.html
This is a sidebar that I forgot I wrote, called Welcome to System Two.
http://planetwavesweekly.com/drdc8/restof2006/20060901x.html
This is from the week before Pluto was reclassified, when it looked like the way the IAU would go would be to add dwarf planets as “actual planets,” including both Pluto and Charon. It was actually Mike Brown, the discoverer of Eris, whose support tipped the scales in favor of Dwarf Planets being classified as such (at the time, Pluto, Ceres and Eris). It may have also been that Mike knew which way the wind was blowing and wanted to stay friends with his colleagues and not seem like the dork he isn’t, so he went with the new classification.
My only personal objection to that was that one of the scientific criteria to define planet and thus de-define Pluto as a planet was: the object in question had to have already “cleared its orbit.” Which is just absurd, because Jupiter is out there sucking in anything that comes near it, and Neptune obviously hasn’t cleared Pluto out of the way of its orbit otherwise I would not be sitting here blasting Amnesiac writing to you about it late this Tuesday night.
This may be covered by a password – if so, use your usual PW subscriber keywords. I’ll make a free version for tomorrow.
http://planetwavesweekly.com/drdc8/restof2006/20060818.html
“The view of the horizon is the lover.” –Gegelpani
Heee Haaa. So, did Barbara say what sign Niribu will appear in and which dimension we should be tuned to – should be any decade now, eh?
poor pluto…
for a related comic (or tragi-comic, in my opinion) check out this link:
http://thepaincomics.com/weekly050119a.htm