For thousands of years their had been seven "wanderers" (the Greek meaning of planetos) in the sky: the Sun, Moon, Mercury Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn; it is from this retinue of gods that our lucky seven and the seven days in the week are derived. Then in 1781 the astronomer William Herschel discovered a planet beyond Saturn; at first he thought it was a comet, but after a few decades of squabbling over a name it came to be known as Uranus.

After Uranus’ 1781 telescopic discovery it was noticed that Uranus' orbit was not obeying Newton’s laws. When it was conjectured that an as yet undiscovered more distant planet must be perturbing its orbit, many great minds set out to discover this planet X. Neptune was discovered in 1846 near to the position predicted from calculations based on the positions of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus.

Then in 1930, Clyde Tombaugh, at the age of 24, discovered the planet Pluto that for 76 years was to be the ninth planet of our solar system. And then, on August 24, 2006, the IAU defined a "planet" as an object that:

1) is in orbit around the Sun;

2) has sufficient mass to overcome its compressive strength and achieve hydrostatic equilibrium; i.e., a nearly round shape;

3) has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit of significantly sized bodies other than its own satellites;

Because other objects, one (Eris) even larger than Pluto, were being discovered in Pluto's neighborhood (the Kuiper Belt), Pluto lost its astro-nomical status as a planet. As of September 2011 there are five dwarf planets in our solar system: Eris (a TNO [trans-Neptunian object] larger than Pluto); Pluto a TNO in the Kuiper belt; Haumea (originally 2003 EL61, an elongated KBO longer than Pluto and with a moon); Makemake (2005 FY9); and the asteroid Ceres. The four TNOs Sedna, Orcus, 2007 OR₁₀, and Quaoar are virtually certain to eventually be included as dwarf planets.

The IAU has subsequently decided that unnamed TNOs with an absolute magnitude greater than +1 (at least 520 miles in diameter) will be named under the assumption that they qualify as dwarf planets. It is currently estimated that there are 50 - 400 more dwarf planets in the solar system, most of them in the Kuiper belt. Astronomically speaking, there are currently only eight planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Although Pluto is no longer considered a planet by astronomers, almost all astrologers concur it is still manifests symbolically in the human psyche, whether or not it is called a planet. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" (Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare).

This Is Pluto a Planet or not a Planet page and much of this entire 550-page website are excerpted from You and the Universe, a handmade, individualized fine art book on astrology, mythology and astronomy through which the recipient's complete astrological reading is woven.