the lunar eclipse in pisces ♓🌕

My books are open! You can find information about readings with me at the end of this newsletter. I hope to meet you soon! :)

I was born during eclipse season, two days after an unusual February full moon in Virgo (you can figure out the year). So in theory I should be on top of my eclipses, especially mutable ones like the one happening this weekend. According to my Git commits, I spent August's new moon releasing v1 of Ephem. I almost elected it for the exact lunar-solar conjunction, but that was past my bedtime and she ended up with a Taurus ascendant. This issue of Hackstrology is half astrology, half tech, and in true fashion, not cleanly either in either half.

sailorfe@hackstrology $ ephem cast 2025-09-07 18:08 "Pisces Lunar Eclipse"
Pisces Lunar Eclipse (Tropical)
2025-09-07 18:08 UTC
☉   15 Virgo 22 28
☽   15 Pisces 21 59
☿   10 Virgo 02 45
♀   15 Leo 41 47
♂   20 Libra 19 22
♃   19 Cancer 02 59
♄   29 Pisces 32 20 r
♅    1 Gemini 27 45 r
♆    1 Aries 11 15 r
♇    1 Aquarius 39 49 r
T☊  18 Pisces 20 03 r

a visit to the 11th house

This newsletter started with the conceit of being biweekly for each new an full moon, and I kicked off what I called a "full moon series" with my enormous Saturn/12th house issue with various citations and cultural touchstones I think about all the time, whereas Jupiter—yes, my chart ruler—and the 11th house are not as foregrounded in my mind. So in lieu of a proper "The Place of Jupiter" letter (we might get this for the Sagittarius new moon instead), I have some shorter ruminations on the 11th house I've had with friends in the disparate circles I move in. They didn't necessarily know we were discussing the 11th house, but I did.

I don't have my Brennan brick in front of me, but I believe the 11th house has simply been "friends" for millennia. What does that really mean, though, to a slave-owning Roman citizen? Probably others of similar position, given how stratified the rest of the houses are: the wife (7th house) comes between slaves (6th house) and her dowry (8th house). The native's parents (4th house) are similarly sandwiched by his siblings (3rd house) and his children (5th house).

The logic of the 12th house's "hidden enemies" is from the 12th, like the 2nd and 8th, being "dark" to the ascendant. Wouldn't you think the most natural place for an enemy to hide is in plain sight: the 11th? Or that enemies often starts as friends.

The thing about Jupiter—and Pisces and Sagittarius—is it's magnanimous. It has poor security. It welcomes everyone like a cult leader appealing to the masses, or a host who doesn't know when to stop giving. Local Linux user compares Saturn to cryptography. But what I think comparing the 11th house to other "others" houses should help us be more honest about how we see the people we surround ourselves with, or at least this is how I've been approaching in client work lately. There's some 11th house keywords I'm interested in sorting elsewhere, not to judge how liberally we use "friend" and "community" but suggesting a tagging system:

• By community, do you really mean audience? That's more 10th house. Are you actually interested in exchange with the people you're showing up in front of? I see this in theater: philosophizing that the audience "completes" the work or engages the performers as peers. This is lovely and democratizing, but casts the audience in a role they may not have signed up for. And I see this in fandom for the opposite reason: fan creators using "community" euphmestically to complain they get less engagement now that more people write and draw than ever before.
• By collaborator, do you really mean consumer? I have started seeing the 8th house as more alive and communal, because if you're truly working on something with others, it stops being totally yours. To follow this dichotomy logically, I don't judge or belittle consumption: that's the 2nd house, and we all do it to live and feed ourselves physically and creatively. It makes me think of open source and how good pull requests come from people who really use the software. You cross from end user to contributor by digesting first.
• By friend... what do you really mean? If you can guess, the main social media I use is Tumblr and Discord (I'm trying Mastodon), and the distinction between "mutual" and "friend" is thin but precious to me. The latter keeps some distance that I don't remember seeing on Meta or Twitter. Maybe this is my damage from being a medium presence on theater Twitter in the pandemic, but I twitch a little when people I met online refer to me as a friend, and especially when people seem invested in exchanges I happen to have with friends in public. It makes me feel monitored. I'm not totally sure where I would put mutuals and followers astrologically, but I want them somewhere odd, like the 6th house, perhaps. It's not as direct as the 7th, but still quite remote and not as egalitarian as the 8th.

I really believe it's okay to be stricter with who you let into your world, and keep a tighter lid on the 11th house. This was a deeply Aquarian approach to Jupiter, but I'm headed for my Saturn return, okay?

ephem update

You can get a stable release of Ephem (1.0.2) off of PyPI with

pip install --user project ephem-cli

But if you want to join me in dogfooding v2, you can also do

pip install ephem-cli \
  --pip-args="--index-url https://codeberg.org/api/packages/sailorfe/pypi/simple/ --extra-index-url https://pypi.org/simple --pre"

I've posted two devlogs so far on my static website, which I'm still trying to figure out an RSS feed for (I use Eleventy):

• Ephem Devlog 01
• Ephem Devlog 02

The two things I'm proudest of since the last update (Aug. 27) are fixing some redundant and recursive code in my database handling, and creating, to the best of my ability, half a page of The American Ephemeris (midnight edition) with the command ephem cal:

The test database I keep on my dev box is truly a bit creepy, but you can imagine people who make astrology software like to test it on themselves and share those tests, so I've found birth data for the creators of Planetdance¹, Luna², and Astrolog³:

If you're curious, we all have heavy Jupiter between Jean Cremers' Pisces stellium, Walter Pullen's Sag stellium, and Kevin DeCapite's (I've never used Luna, sorry, man) Sag stellium + Pisces moon. Inputting this data really shows me that Python's zoneinfo is strong as hell. Now I just need to write cuter error messages for if someone makes up an IANA tz string like I tried to with "America/Seattle."

Hi hi! I have quite an open menu of offerings that only varies based on length:

• 60-minute reading, $100 USD: This is a good fit if you're new to astrology or don't quite know what you're looking for. We'll take a tour of your natal chart starting from the ground with your ascendant and its ruler, then look up at the sky at the lights and other planets.
• 90-minute reading, $150 USD: Your foundational natal reading with something on the side, such as current or past transits, or timing techniques for your birthday or Saturn return.

If you're interested, reply here or email me directly hello@sailorfe.dev.

website | codeberg | mastodon