Percival Lowell

Percival Lowell was a dreamer who pointed his dreams at the sky. Born in 1855 into a prominent Boston family, he read mathematics at Harvard before an old astronomical hunger took hold, and he travelled the world, from Japan to the high desert of Arizona, chasing clear nights. In 1894 he raised his own observatory at Flagstaff, and there he gave himself to Mars, convinced its surface was laced with a vast network of canals, evidence, he insisted, of intelligent life. The canals proved a mirage, yet his vision seized the public imagination, and his patient calculation of the outer planets' orbits set in motion the search that would find Pluto.

His Sun in Pisces tells the story: the mystic and old soul who shines through the intangible and the imagined, a mind that can grow drunk on its own image of things, sometimes lost in the mirage it loves. That Sun burns in the ninth house of higher learning and far horizons, marking him a true philosopher of the cosmos, the global scholar. His Moon in Capricorn gave him the stoic, dutiful discipline to build and to endure, set in the sixth house of tireless daily service. Cancer rising softened the mask of this restless, sky-gazing seeker.