Ole-Johan Dahl

Six of the ten planets are cardinal and only one is mutable, which is a chart that starts things and does not much revise them afterwards. Air and water take three each, with two apiece in fire and earth. The Sun, Mercury and Venus fill fourteen degrees of Libra. The record is one line: Dahl made Simula, the first object oriented programming language.

This chart holds a grand cross, which is the rarest of the closed figures and the least comfortable of them: four planets at right angles the whole way round, with no side that can be let go of. The four here are the Sun, Saturn, Uranus and Pluto, and the pairing inside it with the most in it is Saturn in hard contact with Uranus at a third of a degree, order against revolt: the fight between security and freedom, sudden breaks from long commitments, and frustration with rules that serve nobody.

Mars sits sixty degrees from Saturn at under a fifth of a degree, the tightest usable contact in the chart, and the reading is sustained effort: craftsmanship, training, and the rare ability to work at something for years. For an engineer the record credits with one language and the word first, sustained effort is the plainest reading available and the one least likely to be wrong. Jupiter sits in easy contact with Uranus at a third of a degree as well, fortunate change: being in the right place when something shifts, and an ease around new ideas. A T-square closes on that same Uranus using Mercury and Saturn, so one planet carries the grand cross, the T-square and both of those contacts at once.

Mars also stands at an awkward angle to Uranus at seventeen hundredths of a degree, which is a fourth separate contact to the same planet. The Moon sits on the first degree of Scorpio at noon with Libra still possible, so it is left out, and that costs the tightest transit on the day of death as well. Uranus alone was retrograde. Dahl died at Asker on 29 June 2002, at seventy. Venus stood in hard contact with the natal Mars at a quarter of a degree that day and in easy contact with the natal Uranus at four tenths, and Jupiter stood conjunct the natal Pluto at under half a degree. The Moon was disseminating and eighty per cent lit, a phase that passes on what was worked out and needs it to land, which for a language other people went on to write in is the closest this sky comes to a comment.