Easter Fare
By
Gypsy Joy.
There is a bunny dwarf planet
In the famous Kuyper Belt
Who was once discovered at Easter
And quickly called Easter Bunny
Which at the time seemed justly.
Somehow the dwarf planet’s namesake
Needed more deity
And so the dwarf planet was called Makemake
After Rapa Nui’s god
Who means to Easter Island a lot.
On my gypsyjoy.com formerly yesterdaysyouth.com I wrote once a story “What’s in a Name?”
Today’s Easter Fare poem and story though
is a follow-up on what I posted here yesterday. Both recent stories are connected to Easter Island and two Dutch explorers:
Jacob Roggeveen who explored land and sea and
Gerard Peter Kuiper who explored the stars and the planets in the sky.
It’s interesting to know that the Makemake dwarf planet discovered in 2005, may be the largest planet in the Kuiper belt. Since it is considered to be an Easter asteroid discovery by a Dutch-American gentleman, the story ties nicely in with Easter Island’s discovery earlier by another Dutch gentleman in 1722.
The Kuiper belt is called after Gerard Peter Kuiper (1905-1973) who was born in The Netherlands in the village of Tuitjenhorn in the Province of North Holland. Gerard Kuiper had an interest in astronomy at an early age and was blessed with extra-ordinary sharp eyesight. This visual gift allowed him to see magnitude 7.5 stars with the naked eye. Gerard Kuiper studied Astronomy at the Leiden University in The Netherlands and finished his doctoral thesis on binary stars in 1933. Immediately there after he went to California. Two years later he went to the Harvard College Observatory. He had planned to move to Java, Indonesia to work at the Bosscha Observatory but accepted a position at the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago instead, and became an American citizen in 1937. In 1949, Gerard Kuiper initiated the Yerkes–McDonald asteroid survey (1950–1952).
More about the Makemake Rapa Nui Easter Island god, the Makemake dwarf planet and how it got its name in 2005 and the Dutch-American Astronomer Gerard Kuiper and Bosscha, Indonesia on:
http://www.windows2universe.org/mythology/planets/dwarf_planets/makemake.html&edu=elem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Kuiper
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosscha_Observatory
For more about Jacob Roggeveen and Easter Island check my BLOG post:
“Easter Hither and Tither…”
