Daniel M. Tani

Three of his ten planets sit within half a degree of a sign boundary, which is unusual enough to lead with: Mercury seventeen arcminutes from the end of Aquarius, Venus thirty from the end of Pisces, and Mars six arcminutes into Cancer and retrograde. Earth and water take three each, with two apiece in fire and air, and five of the ten are fixed. The record is five words long: two flights, and six spacewalks. Tani is an astronaut, and that is the whole of it.

Saturn sits a fifth of a turn from Neptune at two hundredths of a degree, which is as near exact as a contact comes, and the reading is imagination made durable: faith that survives scrutiny, and people who finish things. It is also a contact between two slow planets, so the orb belongs to a whole cohort rather than to a person, and the honest thing to do with it is admire the number and move past it. For a record five words long, that is a disappointing place for the tightest orb in the chart to land.

Mercury sits in easy contact with Mars at under four tenths of a degree, and the reading is mental energy that goes somewhere: people who think clearly under pressure, and who finish what they start explaining. Thinking clearly under pressure, in a record whose entire content is six excursions outside a spacecraft, is the fit a reader will want, and the phrase under pressure is doing double duty by accident here, since in that trade the pressure is a number inside a suit. The useful half is the first part, and it is a reasonable thing to want in anybody with that training.

Mercury also sits in quiet contact with Venus at a fifth of a degree, charm in communication: somebody easy to talk to who negotiates without it feeling like negotiation. Venus sits in hard contact with Mars at three fifths, attraction and drive disagreeing, so the same Venus is comfortable with the mind and at odds with the drive. The Moon lies at an awkward angle to Saturn at two thirds of a degree, need meeting refusal: difficulty asking for anything, and being far more self-sufficient than was ever wanted, and its sign is certain at twenty three degrees of Leo. Mars, Uranus and Pluto were the three retrograde planets. Jupiter came back to its Capricorn birth degree on 3 November 2020, at fifty nine, and four laps precede it.