1I/ʻOumuamua Discovery Chart

On the nineteenth of October 2017, from the high volcanic slope of Haleakala in Hawaii, an astronomer named Robert Weryk caught a faint, tumbling streak in the Pan-STARRS survey and realised, with a jolt, that it did not belong to us. 1I/ʻOumuamua was the first visitor ever confirmed from beyond our Sun's family: a reddish, wildly elongated sliver of rock or ice, formally 1I/2017 U1, already turning for home after slipping past the Sun some forty days earlier. It showed no comet's tail, yet accelerated as though gently pushed, and to this day nobody is quite certain what it is or where it began.

The chart of this discovery carries the Sun in Libra, Venus's sign of the Scale, the archetype of balance, symmetry and the meeting of two sides. How fitting for a moment defined by a meeting: the first careful handshake between our system and another. The Moon, too, rests in Libra, that beautiful, Aphrodite-natured Moon forever weighing the scale, forever tactful. Together they lend the event a diplomatic, almost courteous signature, a stranger passing through, glimpsed briefly, then gone gracefully back into the dark between the stars.