Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Fire takes four of her ten planets, air three, earth two and a single one water, with five of the ten cardinal and only one fixed. Mercury sits on the last degree of Aries. The record says Payne-Gaposchkin worked out that stars are made mostly of hydrogen, in a doctoral thesis she was pressured into calling unreliable, and that it was correct and is now called the most brilliant thesis in astronomy.

The Sun sits at an awkward angle to Saturn at fourteen hundredths of a degree, and the reading is identity meeting a rule that will not move: self-doubt, delay, a difficult or absent authority figure, and the one consolation that what gets built under this aspect tends to last. Set against that record, every clause of it lands. The authority was a senior astronomer who would not move. The delay ran for decades. The self-doubt was put in writing, in her own words, at somebody else's insistence. And the thing built under it lasted, and is now the standard account of what stars are made of.

That is about as complete a fit as this project has printed, and the honest work is in saying what it is. The reading was written as a general statement about angles between the Sun and Saturn, and would be handed to anybody born across those few days. It names no thesis and no astronomer. What makes it worth the space is that the record is specific enough to test each clause separately, which almost no record here is, and all four happen to hold. Venus also sits in direct opposition to that same Saturn at under a fifth of a degree, warmth meeting a wall: feeling unworthy, and withholding first in order not to be refused.

Five cardinal planets with a single fixed one is the other fact, and in somebody who was right and said otherwise for decades it reads awkwardly: cardinal starts things and fixed holds a position, and the record describes a position held under protest for a very long time. Her Moon sits on the third degree of Libra at noon with Virgo still possible, so it is left out, and a T-square using that Moon with Venus and Saturn goes with it. Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus were the three retrograde planets. She died at Cambridge on 7 December 1979, at seventy nine. Nothing usable came inside half a degree of a natal planet that day. The Moon was disseminating and eighty four per cent lit, a phase that passes on what was worked out and needs it to land.