The distribution over the diurnal cycle of Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn was computed for both genders of 2824 Gauquelin couples. I found that the distributions of the five “Gauquelin planets” in combination are significantly different between the two genders. Wives have a higher frequency of planets near the Ascendant, especially of Venus.

The prosperous ironmonger Samuel Hemmings and King George III were supposedly born at the same hour and died at the same hour after lives showing striking similarities. The original source is said to be a death notice in the newspapers of February 1820 but such a notice could be found. However, a notice was found that mentioned a respectable furnishing ironmonger Richard Speer. It said he was born at the same hour as the King, died near the same time, and to show his loyalty he chose the same day to get married. It makes no menion of his prosperity or of similarities in their lives. But even the simulataneous birth and marriage may be in doubt, because there is no mention of Samuel Hemmings or Richard Speer in the baptism and marriage records for London in the International Genealogical Index. The probability of such a birth and death twin occurring by chancew when corrected for multiple endpoints is unremarkable. The life of George III is unusal, well documented and deserving of astrological study.

The French sceptics’ (CFEPP’s) test of Gauquelin’s Mars hypothesis with 1066 athletes’ birth data conducted from 1982 to 1993 purportedly showed negative results. I re-analysed this data and found positive indications of a Mars effect which were statistically significant. It turned out that the CFEPP’s attempted refutation of Gaquelin’s claim resulted from biased sampling (preponderance of low eminent athletes) and from biased data analysis (wrong chance expectancy, inferior sector definition, neglected eminence subdivision). The author doubts, however, that an ongoing worldwide spread of the sceptics’ message (“The “Mars effect” doesn’t exist”) will be affected by present counter evidence. Resistance to accepting uncomfortable hard facts is considered an urgent problem for sociologists of science.

(1) Is the scientific approach relevant to astrology? Yes, but only to those parts testable by observation. No distinction between Material and Formal cuases is necessary. Thus to test whether a person fits his chart better than a control requires no causal assumpitons whatever. (2) Why are scientists and astrologers in conflict over whether astrology works? Mainly because they tend to look at different things. Scientists are mostly concerned with accuracy (controlled tests) whereas astrologers are mostly conerned with satisfaction (client acceptance). But accuracy is unrelated to satisfaction. So their views can conflict yet both can be right. In particular cases a more important reason on either side may be dishonesty, ignorance and arrogance.

In part 1 of this article I reported a significantly high frequency of synastry aspects in married couples. In this article I present the results of a control experiment in which the birth dates of the couples have been shifted in time. I produced 16 control samples consisting of couples whose birth dates were shifted with a constant number of days backwards and forward in time. I found that the shifts rendered aspect totals which were not significant. Only small shifts (two days) produced results that were close or even slightly larger than the aspect total connected to the unshifted birth dates. So my conclusion was that the previously reported finding is not due to an artefact associated with the age differences between married partners.

A critical examination and replication of an experiment by Ertel on Gauquelin’s character trait hypothesis (CTH) is reported. Ertel and co-workers re-analysed the same US birth data used by Gauquelin in a previous report of positive results to test for bias by Michel Gauquelin in extracting the traits from biographies. Ertel reported negative results, concluding that CTH positive findings were due only to Gauquelin bias. The present study closely followed Ertel’s procedure, using the same material once again, but the extractions were made by two students at the University of California at Fresno under the authors’ supervision. The results confirm Gauquelin’s former positive results, contradicting Ertel’s conclusions, and suggest a Gauquelin bias insufficient to affect the main results significantly in favour of CTH. Possible reasons for the differences between the results of the present study and Ertel’s are discussed.

Gauquelin maintains that the correlation between birth frequencies of eminent people and the position of planets at the time of their births arre due to some hereditary readiness. According to this view specific responsiveness of professions to the planets is associated with character dispositions, in support of which M and F Gauquellin provided empirical evidence by extracting trait expressions from biographies. Using more rigorous controls, the author, with help from a research student, tested for trait variation in biographies among groups of professionals having different planets in sensitive zones. Trait extractors did not know the planetary positions of the perosnalities to which the biographies were devoted. The character trait hypothesis was not supported. Previous positive rsults reported by M and F Gauquelin might be explained by not having excluded extraction bias arising from astrological knowledge and expectancies.

This follow-up to “The Moon’s nodes in Synastry” investigates a further 18.000 emlnent couples. lnitially, the results were statistically significant, until the addition of a large number of royal couples. The results show marked similarity to those of the original study, and it is now clear that any result is most dramatic with conjunctions to the partner’s moon.

2297 volunteers completed personality questionnaires, measuring Psychoticism, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Impulsivity, Venturesomeness and Empathy. The most extreme scorers – top and bottom 12.3% – were subjected to a diurnal planetary sector analysis. Some samples showed a slight association with certain planets, associations that require replication.

Precision of birth time recordings greatly increases between 1800 – 1950, while key sector percentages do not. This puzzling lack of a correlation is somewhat weakened by three additional observations possibly indicating an effect of record precision in different ways.