Dear Friend and Reader:
The Moon is in late Virgo this morning and enters Libra today at 5:30 pm EDT, as the Sun works its way through the last degrees of Capricorn. Libra Moon plus Capricorn Sun means we’re beginning the last quarter phase of the Moon, which concludes in a solar eclipse on Jan. 26.
The Mercury retrograde is now fully underway, as Mercury heads for its a conjunction to Jupiter, then an interior conjunction to the Sun on Inauguration Day next Tuesday. Meanwhile, you have someone to blame for everything wrong with your fax machine, the late check or losing your car keys. The aspect for today is a trine between the Sun and a new planet called Makemake.
As we have been discussing for the past week or so, communication is one of the many themes infusing our current time on this planet. What we say, how we say it, how we hear things and how others hear us is the motif running beneath most of our time spent trying to get a handle on the mysteries life presents to us.
New communication devices come out practically every hour. We also live in an age of planetary discovery, when more new things appear than we know what to do with.
Makemake (pronounced mahkay-mahkay) is a dwarf planet (a kind of planet beyond Neptune) that astronomers Mike Brown, David Rabinowitz and Chad Trujillo discovered in March of 2005. It’s getting considerable energy in the minor planet cults, though we have not covered it in this section of Planet Waves before. It’s one of the largest known objects in something called the Kuiper Belt — a field of comet-like objects that is scattered in the region of Pluto. This body was initially known as 2005 FY9 (and later given the minor planet number 136472).
Makemake is from the same discovery team that brought us Quaoar, Sedna and Eris — some of the great discoveries of our time; and it was one of three discoveries made at about the same time as Eris (the other is Haumea, which is football shaped). The three were discovered on the same day. They are depicted in this illustration, which shows their approximate sizes visually. All of these are planets orbiting our own Sun. Makemake takes just under 310 years to orbit (compare with Pluto at 248 years). Because it’s out of Pluto’s resonance, it is classified as a cubewano and gets named after a god/goddess of creation or resurrection. The planets in range of 250 years (i.e., within Pluto’s resonance) are classified as plutinos, and are named for underworld gods and goddesses.