Julia Margaret Cameron

Not one of her ten planets sits in an earth sign. Water takes four, with three apiece in fire and air, and five of the ten are mutable. The record says Cameron was given a camera at forty eight, and made deliberately soft focus portraits that professionals called incompetent and that are now considered the finest of the era.

The Sun sits directly opposite Neptune at just under nine tenths of a degree, and two T-squares close on that pairing, one adding Mars and one adding Pluto, so the figure presses on it from two directions and has no outlet. The standing reading of the opposition is the self obscured: confusion about direction, and vitality that comes and goes for no clear reason. A photographer who deliberately took the focus off and was told for years that it was a failure of competence has that aspect in a form nobody would have predicted, and the record settles the argument in her favour rather than the chart doing it.

The Sun sits square Mars at half a degree, drive and identity arguing. The Moon sits in hard contact with Pluto at a third of a degree, which is the closest contact here, and its sign is certain at eight degrees of Leo, where identity is unusually solid and unusually visible. Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were the three retrograde planets, and there is no earth anywhere in the chart of somebody whose medium was a glass plate.

She died at Kalutara on 26 January 1879, at sixty three. Mars stood square her natal Pluto at two hundredths of a degree that day, the closest thing in that sky, with the Moon conjunct her natal Mars at six hundredths and Venus sixty degrees from her natal Neptune at a quarter. The Moon was new and fourteen per cent lit, a phase that starts things without waiting to see the whole of them.