Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan taught a whole planet to look up, and to look at itself as a pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam. Born on 9 November 1934, he carried the Sun in Scorpio, the sign of the eagle and the researcher, whose power comes not through the fist but through the penetrating mind that reads what is hidden. That solar light fell in the sixth house, the Lion King of daily work and service: he shone by labouring, publishing more than six hundred papers, directing Cornell's Laboratory for Planetary Studies, forever perfecting his craft. His Scorpionic gift for probing the buried and the unknown became exobiology, SETI, and the amino acids he coaxed from raw chemistry. His Moon in Sagittarius in the eighth house married two great appetites: the philosopher's hunger for freedom and the cosmos, and the deep transformative waters of mortality and mystery. Small wonder he could speak of billions upon billions with childlike wonder, changing the atmosphere of any room he entered through Cosmos, seen by half a billion people. With Taurus rising, he met the world as a steady, reassuring voice of quiet authority. He calculated the greenhouse furnace of Venus, sent our Golden Record into the dark, and made the universe feel like home. He died in 1996, aged sixty-two.