Venus opposition Neptune ℞ in Aries · Venus trine Pluto ℞ in Aquarius

Venus is the story today, and she's playing two hands at once. In Libra, in her own domicile, she's applying to an opposition with Neptune while simultaneously trining Pluto and pulling toward Uranus. A planet this dignified doesn't collapse under a Neptune contact the way a peregrine Venus would — she keeps her judgment — but there's still a fog rolling in from Aries, and it's the kind of fog that flatters things. Something looks lovelier, or more meaningful, than it is. The Pluto trine underneath gives real depth where there is real depth; it will not, on its own, distinguish the two. That's the work.

Mars, fast and exact on Betelgeuse, is the other thing worth stopping over. The Shoulder of the Hunter under a Mars applying to trine the North Node — this is martial forward motion with the wind behind it, and the Moon spends her last Gemini hours in the mansion of Orion's contest before slipping into Cancer around a quarter to eight UTC. After that ingress the tone softens considerably; the Moon in her own sign is a different animal, even waning and dim at fourteen percent.

The Sun-Saturn trine is separating, and I'd normally let a separating aspect go, but Saturn is in fall and received by the Sun through exaltation — the Sun is holding Saturn up, essentially, and that reception is doing more work than the trine itself. It's why Saturn's weakness isn't as loud this week as the raw dignity table suggests.

Jupiter combust in Leo I'll mention and move past; he's swallowed. The outer planets are humming their long sextiles and trines to each other in the background, as they have been.

Watch the Venus opposition. Dignity is not immunity.