Caroline Herschel

Caroline Herschel spent much of her early life expected to keep house, and rose to become the first woman ever paid as a scientist, the first to hold a government post in England, and the discoverer of comets that still carry her name. Her Sun in Pisces tells you where she truly shone: in the mystical, patient, boundless realm of the night sky. Pisces is the old soul, the culmination of all the signs, and its Sun gives itself over completely to something larger than the self. For years she served as her brother William's tireless assistant, recording, calculating, sweeping the heavens, dissolving her own ambitions into the shared work until her own genius surfaced in comet after comet, eight in all.

Her Moon in Cancer is the Moon at home, the double-whammy mother goddess: deeply feeling, intensely loyal to family and lineage, nurturing to the core. That Cancer devotion bound her to her brother and their shared household for a lifetime, and it fed the quiet endurance behind the science. In 1828 the Royal Astronomical Society awarded her its Gold Medal. Piscean vision, Cancerian heart: she gave herself to the stars, and the stars gave her name back.