Icarus, asteroid 1566 (the 1566th asteroid to be discovered, on June 22, 1949), was named after the character from Greek mythology who died because he flew so close to the Sun that his wings (which were made of feathers and wax) melted. At the time, Icarus and his father were flying away from imprisonment on the island of Crete. The name is appropriate, in that Icarus’s eccentric orbit (which takes a little more than a terrestrial year) carries it closer to the Sun than to Mercury. The asteroid is less than 1½ kilometers in diameter and is one of the more recent asteroids to be investigated by astrologers. Preliminary material on Icarus can be found in Demetra George and Douglas Bloch’s Astrology for Yourself, and an ephemeris (table of celestial locations) for Icarus can be found in the second edition of George and Bloch’s Asteroid Goddesses. Unlike the planets, which are associated with a wide range of phenomena, the smaller asteroids are said to represent a single principle. George and Bloch give Icarus’s principle as “liberation”; their tentative key phrase for Icarus is “My capacity for liberation and risk-taking.” Zipporah Dobyns regards the occurrence of Icarus in a prominent house, sign, or aspect related to the element fire as indicating the danger of overreaching oneself or acting prematurely. J. Lee Lehman relates Icarus to the power one gains from reconstituting oneself after the experience of “death” (in one form or another). In a more exoteric vein, Lehman also associates Icarus with flight and accidents. Jacob Schwartz gives this asteroid’s astrological significance as “a need to escape quickly from restrictions, speed, risk taking, shamanic power, awareness of evolving through experience.”
asteroid number 1566. Icarus was discovered by the American astronomer W. Baade in 1949. Its mean distance from the sun is 1.08 astronomical units; its eccentricity, 0.83; and the inclination of its orbit, 23°. Its diameter does not exceed 2 km. Owing to the peculiarities of its orbit, it can approach the earth at a distance of 0.04 astronomical units. It is named for the ancient Greek hero Icarus.