#astro combinations

[harmoonix]

🌻Spring's Dawn🌻

Astrology Observations (Natal and Sidereal chart)

🌻 Sun in the 1st/7th/10th/12th house natives can be really exposed to the world, is like they can never hide themselves from the world

🌻 Sun aspecting Venus natives can be really talented into arts/music, they can be the most positive people in the room, easily liked by people

🌻 Sun in the 5th/9th/11th houses like to share their talents with others, they can inspire people with their creativity

🌻 Mars aspecting the ascendant, the native can be easily liked for their confidence or leadership behavior/personality! People feel so safe around them

🌻 Mars aspecting the Moon natives have an attachment dynamic nature, they can passionately get attach to things and hard let them go

🌻 Mars in the 9H/11H or in Sagittarius/Aquarius can manifest things easily

🌻 Saturn in the 11H sometimes make you to desire something and to achieve it in time, like not on the moment, but for sure is coming even if is a bit slower

🌻 Midheaven aspecting Sun/Neptune/Venus can make someone very creative/talented/blessed with artistic talents

🌻 Sun having less to no aspects in a chart can indicate a native who can easily change their personality/mood

🌻 7H empty sitting in a chart has no negative impact on the native, they rather have it more easy in relationships since no planet influence that house

🌻 Jupiter aspecting Sun can be so lucky because of their personality and charm, the native can aslo have an selfish aura if is too spoiled

🌻 Lilith (h12) aspecting the Sun can make the native to isolate themselves to protect their energy, but is more about their self - expression and wildness who needs to be explored

🌻 Venus square/opposite/conjunct Ascendant gives native a flair of romance/stylish personality/maybe too flirty sometimes

🌻 Venus in in fire signs will love to be chased in a love relationship!! Like they will wait for you to make the first step into the relationship and then to fall for you

🌻 Taurus Suns/Risings/Moons/Venus natives can truly be the kindest people ever, they love to share good vibes with everyone without having a conflict, they're so grounded which makes sense because of their earth element and I love this!

🌻 Ascendant aspecting Neptune can easily create an dependency/obsession over things/people and sometimes situations in their lives

🌻 Venus/Mercury in the 11H natives are really likable/loved by people, people can be so easy in sympathy with them

🌻 Sun in the 11H or in Aquarius can prioritize their friendships over anything, because their friendships can be everything for such natives

🌻 Pluto aspecting Lilith Asteroid (1181) can have an energy of a "bad person" but they're truly not!

🌻 Asteroid Lilith (1181) aspecting Asteroid Aphrodite (1388). The native can have the energy of a badass person yet very charming and romantic

🌻 Aphrodite (1388) aspecting Juno (3) can be easily by liked at first by people, because of their personality, their relationship can be known by people as well

🌻 Uranus aspecting Juno natives can be so unexpectedly in love/in relationships, they can marry someone they never thought to marry with

🌻 Aries Suns/Moon/Risings and Lilith/Venus/Mars can feel like a forbidden fruit, like they can be so untouchable and yet so magnetic

🌻 Aries Saturn natives need to have better standards and to know their self worth, especially learning to have confidence

🌻 Saturn in Libra can sometimes give you karmic relationships. The same for Saturn in the 7H, take care at people who don't want to stay for long in your life

🌻 Neptune/Pisces in the 2H/4H/6H/8H can easily be drained by other people's energy, they're so sensbile to such things

🌻 Venus/Pluto or Aphrodite (1388) in the 8H can make you to ignore the toxic traits of a potential partner and see them as an attractive thing instead (Don't do it)

🌻 Venus in the 6th/10H/11th house axis can make you to engage in relationships with people from the same work field as you

🌻 Venus in the 1st house natives, people can appreciate their beauty but not always their talents. Like this placement can represent "I am more than beauty", they're aslo extremely artistic

🌻 Moon in the 8th/12th house axis are always in the middle of some sort of drama/fight purely for the thing that people can see them as "too" soft, which is not true

🌻 Saturn in the 5H or Saturn in Leo may not want to have kids early in life (some of them don't wanna have kids at all in other cases)

🌻 Sagittarius in the 2H/4H/8H can have a large number of relatives in family. You know like that person who has 6-7 cousins??

🌻 Having Capricorn Sun/Rising/Venus can make people to appreciate your body silhouette. Especially the legs

🌻 It can be so hard for people with Capricorn or Pisces Moon to be understood by others, which in the end can make them sad, you have to find better people in your circle if such things happen

🌻 Sagittarius Mercury and in general Mercury in fire signs natives talk so fast that people need to ask "Can you repeat? I can't understand what you're saying" more times a day 🤣😭

🌻 Sagittarius Saturn/9H can make you have people who want to restrict your freedom and free will, and one thing with this placement is that you always have to keep your mind open to everything

🌻 Jupiter aspecting Venus natives share a love about discovering things, they love to research and dive into interesting topics

🌻 Jupiter aspecting the Midheaven can be like a shooting star for you especially if is in good aspects because it helps you to find your path in job/career

🌻Sun/Moon and sometimes Saturn in the 6H can possess allergies, they can be different types of allergy of course

🌻 I think is very likely for Virgo/Pisces/Scorpio and sometimes Libra or Aquarius placements to study medicine because they get so well within this field

🌻 Saturn at 29° or 0° degrees can be very powerful for this planet, Saturn ends a cycle at 29° and starts a new one at 0° especially a karmic cycle!!

🌻 The time you'll have your Saturn Return. Which happens when Saturn returns back into the same sign it was when you were born. Lots of things can happen during that period. Things that will change your mentally/emotionally/physically/rationally forever

🌻 The fact that for Aquarius Risings, the next years can be very changing since Pluto is entering permanently in Aquarius this year... is so scary yet fascinating in the same time 🥲🥲

🌻 Saturn in Pisces/12H or Pisces Degrees 12°, 24° can receive lots of dreams, have lots of spiritual or subconscious awakenings as well and even new karmic paths

🌻 Hey y'all, 2nd of March of today brings the start of the spring already. Winter finally is ended and we will all slay this whole season 💅🏼💅🏼💅🏼

I wish y'all a very good spring season 🌻🌻🌻🧚🏼‍♀️

Harmoonix ✨🌻

[astronomodome]

anyway I think zedaph’s like. plotline. character arc whatever is so funny to me. This man shows up to hermitcraft after being in a singleplayer world for 100 episodes and the first thing he does is turn around and build a hole in the ground and not talk to hardly anyone. And the second thing he does is trap the door. Excellent. So then he spends a season or two being a genius and inventing new mental illnesses for his viewers to have and etc etc. Dresses up for Halloween as the embodiment of death and goes up to people and asks them to die. Like. Normal things. He builds another hole in the ground and builds a complicated redstone device that can tell the time for him so he doesn’t have to go outside. And of course he traps the door again. Then in season eight he decides you know what I’m going to start regularly interacting with people other than my two (2) close friends. And you know how I’m going to do it. I’m going to put them in a box and psychologically evaluate them. Awesome. Wonderful. We love to see it. You know what that is? Growth. And so now we’re at season nine and he’s pretty regularly teaming up with the others and being silly and everything. And you know like trying to spy on them without them noticing and normal stuff like that. But at the end of the day he still lives in a hole

[itzrafee]

A thing on Uran and Helena in Pluto

Okay a short little thing on Pluto. Uran and Helena are my absolute favourite characters in Pluto. Urasawa has always had amazing side characters, from Mr. Rosso in Monster to Lee Harvey Oswald and Jackie in Billy Bat to God in 20th Century Boys, but very few have tied off the emotional ends of the story like Uran and Helena.

Maybe I'm projecting here but much like myself I feel like Urasawa is absolutely obsessed with Frankenstein. And he recognizes the influence Frankenstein has on Dr. Umataro Tenma. Or at the very least, the similarities between the two. And so when he made the protagonist of one of his most popular works Monster, Dr Kenzo Tenma, he solidified that connection. Kenzo Tenma calls back to Victor Frankenstein needing to end his creation while also calling back to Japan's other famous Tenma, thus making the connection explicit. Another throughline between the three of them is that all three are father figures to their creations and have obligations to their children, though all three have varying levels of success with them.

I've only read what I like to call Urasawa's "Core Four", conspiracy minded thrillers that are essentially road trips featuring usually two main protagonists that we see the world through, Monster, 20th Century Boys, Pluto and Billy Bat. Though I still haven't caught up to Asadora and that could still possibly fit this mold, Urasawa's Core Four share a lot of themes and ideas. One of the most important being the responsibility for one's creations, whether it was Kenji Endo and the Book of Prophecy or Kevin Yamagata and Billy Bat or Dr. Kenzo Tenma and Johan, all of his protagonists could arguably be seen as someone with the need to take up the responsibility of their creations. So where do the protagonists of Pluto fit in there? That's where Uran and Helena come in.

But first, we should take a look at Pluto's themes. While I could be wrong, at a cursory glance, I feel like the general consensus towards it's themes is that it's about hatred. I don't really think that's what it is as I feel like Urasawa is more trying to show us what it is to be human and what it is to be alive. And in that, he has a hidden protagonist in Pluto. Someone who's influence snakes through the plot and isn't seen much, but without who the story's themes would remain incomplete. Pluto tackles what it is to be alive through many things, such as memory, sadness, grief, hatred, love and parenthood. But none of that works without the realization by Tenma of his own mistakes. And Uran and Helena bookend these revelations and are absolutley key to understanding that.

In my favourite chapter of the series, Chapter 37, Uran goes from person to person as she finds a way to deal with her grief and eventually comes across Tobio's grave, Tenma having left recently. It's an absolutely beautiful chapter that shows Uran's humanity and Urasawa's love for sharing these kind and soft moments. But it also sheds a light on Tenma as Uran realizes someone who was grieving has just left. Without saying much at all we realize that Tenma has finally realized his mistakes. In the process of grieving one son, he lost the other. While remembering Tobio, he let Atom go. His grief towards Tobio is clear in the following chapter, Chapter 38. All of the things he wanted Atom to be; Tobio come back to life, Tobio's ghost punishing him, Atom rejected. And Tenma could only see that rejection, and not what he had, another son.

Uran shows us very clearly what Pluto, the story, is. It's a chapter in their lives. And we've come into a story nearing the end for Tenma. And it's through the humanity of two absolutely amazing characters in their own right, Uran and Helena, that we are able to so fully understand Tenma. Despite being robots, these two characters are the most alive of everyone. They love fully and freely and are catalysts of change. Uran's vibrant and full of life in a way that really sticks out. And Helena has such depth that it's evident in every scene she's in. She's not pointed out to be made by any famous scientist so all the life she has is her own. These two represent the life of robot's more than any other characters in the series.

So it's that much more poignant when Helena finally breaks down after putting on such a strong front of everybody. Grief intersects and she brings out Tenma's sadness as well. They've both been putting up such strong fronts that it's heartbreaking to see them collapse. It completes Tenma's growth and strikes a heartbreaking contrast between the two. Tenma became the way he is through the loss of his son whereas Helena doesn't even get to remember her own loss. It makes you wonder if the grief for her and Geischt's child compounds her sorrow too.

Without these two and their grief, a large part of Pluto becomes inaccessible. Pluto is largely about death so when two characters come in who've never had a hand in the grim work of taking life, you see the world through a lens that's absolutely crucial in order to fully connect with all of the character's and their situations. Death and Grief has scarred the characters in Pluto. Time and time again they've chosen the worst path. They've chosen revenge and hatred. But Uran and Helena are different. Without them, the story is incomplete. They provide an alternative. They provide the path towards healing.

im sorry for this one:

[kalki-tarot]

Dark Tarot card combinations ⚠️

By : kalki-tarot 🤍

Hello everyone ♡ i hope you're alright and doing well. This post focuses on tarot card combinations which are common while doing spreads. So, I'm here to give you some insight on that. This may not resonate with everyone as it's my personal interpretation of cards. Thank you ✨️

1. The chariot + 10 Of swords

This can represent an accident which may lead to death or can be proved fatal. The chariot represent a vehicle with high speed and 10 of swords represents getting hurt and blood shed.

2. The Emperor rx and The Devil

This can mean a dominating and powerful individual who misuses their power to harm others. Probably can be a psychopath. This interprets as misuse of power and dominating toxic nature.

3. The tower & 10 of Swords

The tower literally represents a building falling out of place & destruction and 10 of swords means getting hurt. This may mean an earthquake or natural calamity that destroys people and building. This can also mean a war.

4. The devil & The moon

This can represent an unavoidable confrontation with your shadow side or your deepest and darkest aspects. You need to shed some light on your inner demons or toxic behavior. Break the chains by confronting them bravely.

5. The devil & the magician

This tarot combination can represent black magic or using your divine powers or knowledge to harm others.

6. 3 of Swords & 9 of swords

This may indicate a trauma which leads to many mental health problems. Or even a heartbreak which caused very deep and heavy emotional outburst.

[girlfailurefelix]

gff astro big three: ellis sun, greg moon, tony rising

[quietlyblooms]

❛ let me come in you, please. i want to fill you up. ❜ -James

smut sentence starters | @cursedblessed enjoys a lazy morning with chiyo :' )

lazy mornings are chiyo's favorite.

she thinks this when her eyes flutter open to a sleepy james, hair mussed and gaze warm, and as he gets on top of her to place soft kisses along her neck, purposely tickling her at one point, chiyo thinks to herself, she loves lazy mornings with him. is there anything better than to be cocooned in blankets and kissed by someone she loves?

well... maybe there's one thing.

it doesn't take much to make her needy for him. she wants him the minute his hands slide beneath her shirt, unhurried as he takes his time to squeeze her waist, knead her breast. slow and lazy. chiyo likes it despite how impatient she grows, how she whines at him and arches into his touch as if to wordlessly beg, more, more. he listens, sinks two fingers into her heat, and the pace he takes is just as relaxed as the rest of the morning but steady. closer and closer comes that sweet snap inside her, building like a rising wave, beckoned ever nearer by filthy words meant only for her ears. it's all a little maddening to take their time like this -- wonderfully, deliciously maddening.

she's quick to grab james' wrist before he can make her come on his hand. ooh, so close! " not like this, " chiyo gasps, brow furrowed and face flushed. she is desperate and wanting, impatient as ever, but she is a clingy woman in the haze of the morning. she wants james so much closer than he is; she begs for it, voice still thick with sleep. he obliges. of course he does. no matter the teasing he dishes out while tugging her shorts off, chiyo knows he wants her just as badly. his longing is there in the way he captures her lips, greedily swallowing her moans as he buries himself in her slick warmth. they are hungry for each other. there is no shame in that, least of all in the safety of their bed.

slow and lazy. again, chiyo likes it, enjoying the unhurried drag and push of each thrust. she feels every aching inch of james like this, overwhelmingly warm and full and content. his fingers dig into her hips as he slides in deep. chiyo's grip tightens in the demon's hair, and a whimper catches in her throat. she doesn't want this to end. he feels so fucking good.

" you're so good for me, so fucking good around me, fucking made for me. " james unknowingly echoes her train of thought, hissing when she clenches around him. most days, she'd rather watch his composure fall apart, but chiyo wants him as close as he can get. it’s all she can think about as honeyed pleas fall from swollen lips, as her body grows taut in his hands. she tugs james by the hair, wanting him to press his face into the crook of her neck, and the demon's teeth graze her shoulder in return before biting — not hard enough to pierce but hard enough to make her gasp and cling to him. she all but cries his name against his ear. so close. so good. please, let me—

" let me come in you, please. i want to fill you up. ”

he can’t see how her expression shifts, but he feels how tight chiyo gets, hears her whine. “ fuck, james— ” she digs blunt nails into the soft skin of his back, wraps her legs around him, presses her face against the side of his. “ plea— please, i need it. i need you. fuck. ” no longer are they taking it slow, too eager to meet their ends. chiyo’s not sure she’s even making sense anymore. all she can register is that james is saying something before he snakes a hand between their bodies. “ give it to me, please, please, please— ”

his fingers rub relentless circles against her clit just as he snaps his hips against hers, and chiyo clings to him as pleasure washes over her in waves. james doesn’t let up even as she cries how sensitive she is, hitting her deep and hard until finally he’s coming. he’s filling her up as promised, fucking his cum into her, muttering praise against her skin, and the blonde spasms around him all over again as tears fall down her pink cheeks. through it all, chiyo doesn’t let james go. her legs remain tightly wrapped around him, hand fisting his hair and nails leaving crescent marks on his skin. she takes everything he gives her and whispers such sweet words to him, breathless and sated and happy.

god, chiyo loves lazy mornings with james. she loves him, and as soon as she catches her breath, she'll spend the rest of their morning showing him just how much.

[evvasblog]

Hi👋

Could you do a moodboard for Gemini sun, Scorpio Moon And Gemini rising?👉👈🤪✨

Thank you🤍

GEMINI☀️

SCORPIO🌑

GEMINI⬆️

witty

curious

adaptable

shrewd

assertive

[sokosmic]

Poll: Moon - Mercury Combinations Pt. 1

[churino]

Sorry deluxe instecticon fans

I promised the astro squad was gonna get their proper entries

Here's barrage

[aghastro]

TinToyMoon -> Aghastro

[fanfare]

[harmoonix]

The rose of true love🌹

🌹 (Astrology LOVE Observations)🌹

𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐚𝐬 𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞

𝐒𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐬 𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐚𝐬 𝐫𝐡𝐲𝐦𝐞

🌹 - Harsh aspects to your 7th house ruler doesn't mean that you gonna have a bad spouse or a bad marriage, rather these aspects gonna reflect on their negative side, everyone has a negative side and the harsh aspects can tell you about your spouse's ones

🌹 - Cardinal Signs in the 7th house (Aries, Cancer, Libra, Capricorn) can be easily indecisive when they're in love, they can have that "Am I in love or I dreaming" kind of feeling

🌹 - I truly believe Pluto in the 7th house is a game changer, because it not only brings transformation in the relationship but also power and control

🌹 - Venus in the 12th house can have the same influence in relationships as Saturn in the 7th house, meeting lovers later in life, but is for your own good

🌹 - If you have Jupiter in the 11th house and you're attracted to men, this indicator can indicate marrying one or your friends (friends to lovers)

🌹 - if you are attracted to women and you have Venus in the 5th house, this indicator can mean that you'll gonna marry or end up in a relationship with someone who really enjoys life and priorities fun over anything

🌹 - 7th house ruler in the 9th house can indicate meeting your lover in foreign lands/while traveling!

🌹 - 12th house ruler in the 7th house can indicate meeting your lover in your karmic path, this can be an karmic indicator, your spouse can be a spiritual person/spirituality lover

🌹 - Sagittarius in the 7th house/Venus in Sagittarius/Venus in the 9th house, you know those mixed marriages where the couple comes from 2 different ethnicities/nationalities, these placements can have the same vibe

🌹 - POF (Part of Fortune) in the 5th/7th or 8th house can indicate luck in love relationships, same can happen if you have Vertex in the same houses which I think is more common than POF

🌹 - Cancer/Taurus/Pisces/Scorpio over the 5th house cusp can be a bit shy/emotional when they make the first contact at a date

🌹 - Something I do appreciate about Mercury/Gemini in the 7th house is that, they adore to communicate with their partners about everything, like there are no secrets here and your love sign can be calling eachother in cute nicknames

🌹 - Sometimes Sun or Leo in the 7th house can indicate that love relationships gonna play a big role in your life, and also focusing a lot on them during this life time

🌹 - Venus aspecting Neptune natives are very creative when they're in love, is like creativity hits them for them moment to create something for the person they love, for example a love letter/love gift/maybe a plushie/toy maybe some sweets

🌹 - Earth Moons/Earth Venuses have such pure love in them, they're like "I made this thing for you, I know you'll like it"… I definitely see acts of service being their love language

🌹 - Venus or Juno in Aquarius can indicate meeting your lover in online, as well as having the 7th house ruler in the 11th house

🌹 - 7th house ruler in the 2nd house can indicate spending a lot of 🤑🤑🫰🏼🫰🏼 money on your partners/lovers like spoiling them you know that phrase "Habibi come to Dubai"

🌹 - If you have Jupiter in Virgo/6th house or at 6°, 18° degrees 😭 this placement is so cute for your husband, he's gonna be so supportive of you and your relationship

🌹 - Juno in Leo/Juno at 5°, 17°, 29° degrees can indicate a very influential spouse/marriage, that also comes with their own benefits

🌹- Because Moon represents touching/feeling the touch/ A prominent moon in your chart can make you to crave physical touch especially in relationships

🌹 - Gemini Venus/Venus in the 3rd house or Venus at 3°, 15°, 27° degrees, i love these placements lol, I know your spouse (woman or man doesn't matter) has the best jokes ever!! You gonna crack at eachother and laugh all day long

🌹- Aries Juno/Venus/Mars can get easily jealous or possesive, like those people who want to hold your hand 24/7, yes they are, and like if you want to relax your hand for a bit they gonna say "Why did you took your hand away?" ...Because I don't my hand to fall off, thank you ..

🌹- Taurus/Scorpio/Capricorn/Cancer in the 4th house really need that security love check, like always make sure you tell them how much you love them and how much they mean to you

🌹 - Venus in the 8th house and Venus in Scorpio need a lot of reassurance in love, which is not a bad thing, they just wanna make sure you're theirs because they tend to stress a lot about it

🌹 - You know those people who wake you up with kisses?? I just know they gotta have a Pisces or Cancer Venus like, is in their blood to kiss you and stare into your eyes like you're Monalisa or something

🌹 - Libra/Leo/Capricorn/Aquarius Moons, in general people tend to feel in love with your looks and your personality as a whole is wonderful

🌹 - You know those girls who fantasize about getting a mafia boss husband, let me tell you their 10th house has either Pluto/Neptune or Saturn in it (365 days the movie doesn't compare to what these natives desire for a husband)

🌹 - Taurus and 2nd house Venus/Taurus Moons will love to hug you 24/7 they're having a really intense physical love language

🌹 - Capricorn Jupiter/10th house Jupiter gives daddy vibes, if you have this placement, girl you gonna have your own Batman in your house

🌹 - Don't ask my why or from where I know but Sagittarius Jupiter or Jupiter in the 9th house husbands will love to teach you, as like they're the teacher and you're their student, they gonna have more experience

🌹 - Lilith (h12) aspecting the Moon (all aspects) makes the native have to an untamed energy, like they are some anacondas ready to catch their prey

🌹 - Having Venus/Moon - Saturn aspects makes you to the see the good & bad traits and qualities in people, that's what makes them so special, they can see through you and still love you the most (Works better in harsh aspects)

🌹 - Mercury conjuncting Mars or having those planets in the same sign can indicate flirting quite a lot, get ready for the flirt list to be dropped

🌹 - Not gonna lie you at all guys, Venus and Mars aspects (all aspects) or having the those planets in the same sign makes the native to have that love - fight with their partners, and i don't mean "fight" in a bad way is like 1 minute they're arguing the next one they're being lovely with eachother...

🌹 - South Node in the 7th house or Libra can indicate you relied upon a lots of relationships in your past life, like they were your comfort

🌹 - Uranus in the 2nd/5th/7th houses can have quite unique experiences when it comes to their love relationships (experiences they'll never forget for sure)

♥️ Do you guys remember my love posts each one being resembled with a Disney Princess?? I thought that type of post is gonna have a return! And I chose Belle from Beauty and the Beast for this comeback, enjoy♥️ Harmoonix

[astronomodome]

hear me out

fantasy collage au (or something of the like. different jobs or whatever just something with different courses)

Grian and Zedaph are taking very different courses (I DONT WATCH ZEDAPH ENOUGH TO KNOW WHAT HED DO) but are both well known to be tricksters and play pranks and be generally silly

THEN: hey get put into a task or a class together, and shenanigans ensue (they are both in a competition of who is the most silly)

Does that make sense

YOU. keep talking

[clouds-oc-corner]

...help I am starting to have ships for my ocs

[2-toons-2-twists]

ew. rules. Stellarmas, Poppy. run now.

*throws 16 armed smoke bombs at the group*

[ The smoke bombs released! However... ]

"AGH! WHY CAN'T I MOVE?!"

"sorry ma'am. we cannot have you messing with the dream realm."

"if you do, you may ruin the divider between reality and imagination.

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

one of my most annoying qualities as a human is if the museum has a physics or an astro exhibit i Will walk around the entire thing saying “that’s true!”

i did Not cry in the museum but it was a very near thing

[oflgtfol]

On the History of Planethood: A Brief Summary

Excerpt from How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming, Chapter 2: A Millennium of Planets by Mike Brown

The end of the twentieth century was not actually the first time that the word planet had become confusing. The word has existed for thousands of years, and its meaning has been continually updated to reflec tour continually shifting view of the cosmos. Over the millennia there have been a few major events leading to dramatic changs.

The original ancient Greek meaning of the word planet was simply "wanderer," or something that moved in the sky. When, as a teenager, I first noticed Jupiter and Saturn dancing among the stars, I was seeing the sky as it had been seen for millennia and noticing that there were things that were special, things that stuck out, things that moved in a different way. As the sky slowly revolves throughout the year, the stars stay in fixed patterns while the wanderers move separately and conspicuously through the constellations of the zodiac. The ancient Greeks and Romans knew seven wanderers in the sky: the five visible planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, which are all easy to see if you know where and when to look - plus the moon and the sun, which both also move through the sky and were also considered planets in good standing.

In a pre-electric light, pre-urban world, people must have been much more intimately connected with the sky and the planets. Mercury and Venus, which are close to the sun and thus only show up low in the early-evening or early-morning sky, are these days frequently mistake for airplanes; even I sometimes mistake them. But before we became used to the idea of artificial lights in the sky, the recurring appearance of the evening or morning star would have been an obvious and spectacular event that would have been hard to miss. Mars, distinctly red in the sky, even to the naked eye, always stands out. It is no wonder that some of the earliest recorded scientific records of any sort are of the positions of the planets. Everyone would have known what a planet was back then. Planets mattered. And it is no wonder that all of our basic units of time are based on the sky: A year traced the time it took for the sun to go all the way around the sky to reappear at the same location again, while a month ("moon"-th) is about the amount of time it takes for the moon to circle the earth. The seven days of the week are even named after the seven original planets. Sunday, Mo[o]nday, and Satur[n]day are the most obvious, while Tuesday through Friday are more than a bit obscure. Tiw was an ancient Germanic god of war, as Mars was to the Romans, so Tuesday is actually Mars' day. Wednesday is Woden's day. Woden was the carrier of the dead - a Germanic grim reaper - fulfilling one of Mercury's less well known jobs. Thor was the Norse god of thunder, like Jupiter, and Friday is the day of Venus in the guise of the Norse Frigga, the goddess of married love.

Though planets were so deeply embedded into many aspects of everyday life, there is no recording of the public reaction to the first and most significant shock to the word planet. In the sixteenth century the idea began to spread that the sun, rather than the earth, was at the center of the universe and that the earth and the planets revolved around it. Suddenly, the wanderers were in disarray. Instead of the sun and the moon and the other planets revolving around the earth, five of them (the planets) went around one of them (the sun), while the seventh (the moon) went around the earth. The earth, like five of the wanderers, also went around the sun. Copernicus wrote down what is perhaps the most startling proposition of all time: "The motions which seem to us proper to the Sun do not arise from it, but from the Earth and our orb, with which we revolve around the sun like any other planet." We revolve around the sun like any other planet! The sun doesn't move; the earth does. The earth under our feet is like any other planet in the sky. The earth is a planet. What seems so obvious and ingrained in us today must have been profoundly disorienting. I've tried to put myself in the frame of mind of the time and tried to understand how shocking it would have been, but I've never come close. It is as hard for me to image an Earth-centered universe as it would have been for them to imagine anything else. Everybody thought they knew what a planet was, and suddenly, one appeared beneath their feet.

And what of the moon? At least Earth was special in that, of all the planets, it alone had another body going around it. But when Galileo first pointed his crude telescope at the sky in 1609, he discovered that Jupiter, too, had objects going around it (now called the Galilean satellites). Any reasonable pair of binoculars will show you the same thing. Find Jupiter, point the binoculars up (lean against a wall to steady your shaky hands), and you'll see the disk of Jupiter and maybe even some bands of wispy clouds on the disk. Perhaps you'll also see four tiny white dots strung in a line all to one side of Jupiter. The next night look again, and one of the tiny dots might be missing - hidden behind Jupiter - and one might have moved to the other side. The next night they will change again. The little moons are wandering around the wanderer. One of them even has volcanoes. I could tell you a lot about those volcanoes.

Even with Galileo's primitive telescope, he could tell that there were stars in the sky that were too faint for the eye to see. Did he or anyone else think about whether or not there were planets in the sky that were too faint for the eye to see? No one appears to have written about the possibility. Perhaps no one even thought about it. Though the planets had been rearranged and now were secondary to the sun, and the earth had been demoted from the center of the universe to the same status as the other planets, perhaps the possibility of additional planets circling the sun so faintly that we wouldn't know about them was simply beyond comprehension. Why would such invisible things have been put there in the first place?

It took almost two more centuries to stumble upon the answer. In 1781 the British astronomer William Herschel was charting faint stars that could be seen only through his new advanced telescope. He came to one star that looked bigger than the stars around it, which was strange, since all of the stars look simply like points of light and none appears bigger than another. When he looked again the next night, the unusual star had moved. He he found a new wanderer. But since it couldn't be a planet (obviously, since all of the planets were known, right?), what was it? Herschel assumed it was a comet near the earth. Within only a few months, however, he realized that the new object was in a circular orbit well beyond Saturn, where nothing else had ever been seen before. It was no comet, it was a planet. Herschel measured the size of the greenish disk he had found and realized that this new body had to be big - not quite as big as Jupiter or Saturn, but much bigger than any of the other planets in the solar system. The word planet quite naturally expanded to include this new body distantly circling the sun: the seventh planet had been found. Jupiter, the largest planet, was named after the king of the gods. Saturn, originally the most distant known planet, was named after the father of Jupiter. The new wanderer, even more distant than Saturn and unrecognized throughout history until the moment Herschel distinguished it from the stars around it, was - eventually, after sixty years of debate - named Uranus, for the most ancient of all gods. The element uranium, discovered only seven years later, was named in honor of the new planet.

Everybody had known there were only six planets until the moment the seventh was found, but once the prejudice against the idea of new planets was overcome, the idea that there could be other unseen planets was infectious, and as the techniques to build telescopes became more and more available, people began to systematically search the skies for new wanderers. Success came more quickly than expected. On the first day of 1801, Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi - who, like Herschel, had been busy studying stars, not wanderers - discovered the new planet Ceres, the eighth planet, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter.

The eighth planet? Ceres? Most people today have never heard of "planet Ceres," but there was little question at the time that Ceres was indeed a planet. Within a few years it could be found in all astronomy textbooks, alongside Uranus and the others. In keeping with tradition, the element cerium, discovered two years later, was named for the new planet. Most people today have never heard of the element cerium, either, but it is used in the walls of most self-cleaning ovens.

Planet Ceres's problems began just a year after its discovery, when German astronomer Heinrich Olbers, investigating the new planet with his telescope, accidentally stumbled upon yet another unknown object wandering through the sky: the ninth planet, Pallas! Again, there was little question that Pallas was the ninth planet, and the element palladium was named for it in 1803.

Ceres and Pallas, though considered full-fledged planets, had a few puzzling properties. While all of the other planets were well spaced in their orbits around the sun, Ceres and Pallas were, in the cosmic scheme of things, right on top of each other between Mars and Jupiter. They were different from the other planets in other ways, too. The recently discovered Uranus was too faint to be seen without a telescope simply because it was so far past Saturn. With the aid of a telescope, though, the green outline of the disk of Uranus was apparent. But Ceres and Pallas were closer to us than Jupiter, closer than Saturn. They could not be seen without the aid of a telescope not because they were far away, but simply because they were so small compared to all of the other planets. They were so small, in fact, that even with the best telescopes of the day they just looked like little points of light. Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus - wanting to preserve the uniqueness of his own discovery I suspect - coined the term asteroid (“aster" is Greek for "star," as in astronomy, while "oid" means "like") to describe these new objects. To Herschel, Ceres and Pallas weren't like real planets with their visible disks; they appeared "starlike" instead.

Astronomers quickly found two more planets in this same region between Mars and Jupiter - the tenth planet, Juno, in 1804 and the eleventh planet, Vesta, in 1807 - and then, for almost forty years, nothing new came along. This was too many new planets for some people, chemists in particular. There are no elements named after Juno or Vesta. But still, forty years was long enough for the eleven-planet solar system to firmly emplace itself into the teachings of the day. In a secondary school text from 1837, the chapter between "The fourth planet, Mars” and "The ninth planet, Jupiter" is simply called "The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth planets." The schoolkids who had learned about the eleven planets were probably unhappy with what was about to come.

I have never seen these fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth planets, even though they are just as easy to see in my binoculars as the satellites of Jupiter, and I look at the satellites of Jupiter in my binoculars all the time. In fact, I love a solar tour with good binoculars. The rings of Saturn pop out, as does the redness of Mars, and sometimes even the little crescent-moon-shaped sliver of Venus that proved to Galileo that Venus orbits the sun. I can explore the craters and mountains and shadows on the moon for hours. I've carefully tracked down the position of Uranus and stared at it several nights in a row just to experience how Herschel might have felt about his discovery. But I've never even thought to look for any of these objects that were the most exciting astronomical discoveries of the early nineteenth century.

The reason I've never looked for these four individuals, I think, is that just as the four new small planets were becoming accepted as part of our understanding of the universe, a deluge of new objects started to be discovered. By 1851, fifteen more of the new asteroid planets were found, as well as one more large planet - Neptune. Neptune was even deemed large and important enough to name an element, neptunium, in its honor, but almost no one can recall the names of the other fifteen. It was a confusing time. What counted? What didn't? On the wall in my office at Caltech I have a collection of maps of the solar system dating from about 1850 to 1900. Each map labels the solar system differently A page from a sky atlas drawn in 1857 clearly shows Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta as "small planets," while dozens of other asteroids are generally shown in the "zone of asteroids" between Mars and Jupiter. A German map from a year earlier lists all of the known Asteroiden by date of discovery, with no references to their being planets at all. Even by 1896, the solar system map from the Rand McNally Atlas explicitly states that the solar system contains only the sun, planets, and comets asteroids are not mentioned at all - and that planets are either primary (what we would call planets today) or secondary (what we would call moons). In the margins of my Rand McNally map are drawings of how big the sun would look from the planets. At the top of the margin, the sun, seen from Mercury, is huge. At the bottom, the view from Neptune shows a tiny, distant disk. In the middle are the views from Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta, still tenuously holding on to their claims to be planets. The sun looks exactly the same from each of these four since they are all the same distance away.

By the turn of the century, though, somehow all of the confusion about what was and wasn't a planet had settled. I cannot find anything written or drawn in this period that doesn't separate the asteroids from the planets. What was their offense that they were cast down from the pantheon? In the end, their major sin seems to have been that there were too many of them all in the same place. The big planets go around the sun in orbits far from one another with no overlap, but the hundreds of known asteroids had crossing and overlapping orbits and were all one big jumble. How many is too many? When there were only four and the solar system appeared stable at eleven planets - which it did for forty years - no one (except the chemists, who couldn’t discover elements fast enough) seems to have complained. But the prospect of a never-ending parade of smaller and smaller planets all in essentially the same orbit around the sun was too much. There was no official vote or pronouncement, but by the early 1900s it became conventionally agreed that the solar system had only eight planets. Planet Ceres, which had held on for a century, along with all of its smaller neighbors, was demoted, with no outcry from the citizens of planet Earth.

By recognizing that Ceres and the swarm of other new bodies were fundamentally different from planets and should be classified differently, astronomers had - perhaps inadvertently, but certainly profoundly - changed the scientific meaning of the word planet. The word no longer simply meant anything that moved around the sun and wandered around the sky. Asteroids wandered, but they wandered in a swarm; they were the schools of minnows swimming among the pod of whales. Planets were the whales of the solar system.

As a kid I knew asteroids, too. On my poster on the wall they looked like tiny pebbles strewn in a vast band between Mars and Jupiter. They were the things - the meteors - that sometimes hit the moon and made those giant craters. I had seen shooting stars, which I knew were tiny fragments of these asteroids burning up in the earth’s atmosphere. Maybe I didn’t know their individual names or anything specific about them, and perhaps as individuals they were indistinguishable. But from what I knew by the time of my 1970s childhood, the difference between a planet and an asteroid was as obvious as the difference between a boulder and a handful of sand.

After the uncertainty and confusion about planets had been settled for a few decades and textbooks were clear that there were eight and only eight planets, the ninth was finally discovered. Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto by taking repeated pictures of the sky and comparing them to see if anything had changed. On February 18, 1930, he found a faint object that moved from one night to the next: a new wanderer! Unlike the myriad asteroids (hundreds were known by then), Pluto was not between Mars and Jupiter; it was well beyond Neptune, where a real ninth planet should be. Still, it was a bit odd. It was found to go around the sun in an elongated, rather than circular, orbit, and while all of the planets orbit the sun in a flat disk, Pluto was found to be tilted by almost twenty degrees away from the rest. Pluto also looked different. It was so small that you couldn’t tell it was a planet at all. In fact, it appeared starlike. Some astronomers didn’t want to call Pluto a planet. Shouldn’t it just be called an asteroid instead? By then, though, the word asteroid had lost its literal meaning of “starlike” and instead referred specifically to that belt of objects between Mars and Jupiter. Should it be called a comet? Comets can have elongated and tilted orbits like Pluto’s, but none had ever been seen so far away, and the word comet (from coma, Latin for “hair”) specifically refers to the fuzzy appearance of comets in the sky. Pluto was not fuzzy; it looked like a star, albeit one that moved. Though it looked and behaved like no other planet known, there was no other way to classify it, so it became accepted as the ninth planet, had the element plutonium named for it, and remained unchallenged for almost seventy years as the tiny lonely oddball at the edge of the solar system, the planet with the ice spires, the planet with the orbit so extreme that it couldn’t even fit on my poster on the wall, the incongruous period at the end of the solar system.

What I didn’t immediately grasp when Jane Luu joined me on the roof overlooking the San Francisco Bay at the Berkeley astronomy department in 1992 was that the discovery of the Kuiper belt gave Pluto a context. It took me and most other astronomers a few more years to realize that Pluto is neither lonely nor an oddball, but rather part of this vast new population called the Kuiper belt. Just as the explosion of asteroid discoveries 150 years earlier had forced astronomers to reconsider the status of Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta and change them from full-fledged planets to simply the largest of the collection of asteroids, the new discovery of the Kuiper belt would certainly force astronomers to reconsider the status of Pluto. It was becoming more and more clear that if the asteroids were the schools of minnows swimming among the pod of whales, then Pluto and the Kuiper belt objects were simply a previously overlooked collection of sardines swimming in a faraway sea. If Ceres was to be thought of as just the largest of the vast collection of asteroids and thus not a planet, why should Pluto not suffer the same fate? What, after all, was a planet?