Grace Hopper

Five of her ten planets were retrograde at birth, which is half the chart facing backwards, and one of them is Mercury on the last degree of Scorpio. Water takes four, with two apiece in fire, earth and air, and five of the ten are mutable with only one fixed. The record says Hopper built the first compiler and argued that programs should be written in something closer to English, which became COBOL, and that she kept a nanosecond on her desk: a length of wire light travels in one.

Mercury is the planet a reader will be told stands for language, and it was running backwards at her birth, in the woman whose contribution was making a machine accept something closer to English. That is a coincidence of vocabulary and worth exactly one sentence. A retrograde Mercury is in the sky about a fifth of the time, it says nothing whatever about compilers, and the reason to print it is that a reader will notice it anyway and is better told than left to join it up alone.

Mars sits a fifth of a turn from Uranus at fourteen hundredths of a degree, the closest usable contact here, and the reading is quick reflexes: acting well in an emergency, and an instinct for the unconventional move. Arguing in the nineteen fifties that programs should be written in words rather than in numbers was an unconventional move by any measure, and it is the one reading in this chart the record can be set against. Jupiter sits in easy contact with Saturn at under half a degree as well, growth that holds: a career that accumulates rather than spikes, which for a working life ending as a rear admiral is a fair account of the shape.

Her Moon sits on the twenty fifth degree of Virgo at noon with Libra still possible, so it is left out, and the cost is three contacts including the tightest transit on the day she died. Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto were the five retrograde planets. She died at Arlington on 1 January 1992, at eighty five, which is New Year's Day and a coincidence of one calendar rather than of two. Venus came back to its own natal degree that day at three fifths of a degree, which is a Venus return and comes round roughly once a year. The Moon was balsamic and nine per cent lit, a phase that finishes things, lets them go, and is already looking past them.