Planet, schmanet.

Astrologers are unfazed by news that the world's foremost astronomers yesterday kicked Pluto out of the planet club. (And presumably won't allow Pluto to play in any celestial object games.)

"What people call something has very little to do with what it is," said Rob Hand, a leading U.S. astrologer from Reston, Va., who teaches the history of astrology at Kepler College, an online college based near Seattle. "What anybody chooses to call something is irrelevant; it's what sort of effect and use it has."

The 2,500 astronomers from 75 countries gathered in Prague for a meeting of the International Astronomical Union yesterday demoted Pluto from planet to dwarf planet.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune remain the classical eight planets. Pluto and two other objects that were under consideration as planets -- Ceres and 2003 UB313, an icy object a little bigger than Pluto that's nicknamed "Xena" -- will be dwarf planets, The Associated Press reported.

"Most of us are going to keep looking at Pluto and talking about its correspondence on charts," said Madalyn Hillis-Dineen, chairwoman of the National Council for Geocosmic Research, a group of astrologers dedicated to education and research of cosmic phenomena. "Astrologers, 90 percent of them, just use the nine planets and will probably continue to use nine."

A small percentage of astrologers also investigate quasars, black holes and comets.

"Pluto is still good with me and I'm not ready to throw it out of my solar system," said Ms. Hillis-Dineen, of Cape Cod, Mass., who also is marketing director for Astrolabe Inc., a company that creates the software astrologers use to do people's charts.

"They're confused more than anything," said Dave Roell, an astrologer firmly in the Pluto-is-a-planet camp and owner of the Astrology Center of America, an astrological book store in Bel Air, Md. "Science without philosophy is really just a pile of observations without meaning."

Astrologers have accepted Pluto as fact since the 1950s, he said.

"Astronomers have a different set of criteria and I respect that, but I think the amount of energy they're putting into this is bordering on the absurd," Mr. Hand said. "What's a planet? Whatever you choose to call a planet. They chose not to call Pluto a planet? Fine."