Willem Jacob Luyten

Water takes four of the ten planets, air three, fire two and a single one earth, with six of the ten mutable. The record is one line: Luyten catalogued the proper motion of half a million stars.

Mercury sits square Saturn at just over a quarter of a degree, and the reading is thought meeting doubt: self criticism, difficulty being understood, and a mind that treats its own uncertainty as evidence of stupidity when it is usually evidence of care. A T-square closes on that Mercury and Saturn with Neptune, so the figure presses on speech from two sides and has no outlet. For a researcher whose record is a catalogue of half a million entries, a mind that doubts itself and checks again is the reading the work argues for.

The Sun sits in mild friction with Venus at a quarter of a degree, taste slightly out of step with self worth, and the Moon at an awkward angle to Pluto at three quarters. Saturn sits directly opposite Neptune at just over a degree and Mercury square the same Neptune at a degree and two fifths, which is the rest of the T-square. The Sun sits at sixteen degrees of Pisces with Mercury at twenty three, and the Moon answers from Capricorn at thirteen, where a feeling asks what the thing cost first. Both lights are certain. A researcher whose record is a catalogue of half a million entries needed a mind that checks and checks again, and the chart presses on exactly the planet that does the checking.

Luyten died at Minneapolis on 21 November 1994, at ninety five. Uranus stood sixty degrees from the natal Mercury at seven hundredths of a degree that day, the closest thing in that sky, with Mercury itself in easy contact with the natal Sun at three tenths and Mars at that same angle to the natal Saturn at a third. The Moon was full and ninety per cent lit. That is the phase that sees a thing clearly and usually through other people.