East Rochester, NY, 8-year-old fire fighter

[Jim Eshelman]

Many of you will have seen the moving story of 8-year-old Tyler Doohan, who rescued several members of his family from a fire and then died while trying to rescue his grandfather. He was buried this week with the local fire department honoring him with a fire-fighter's funeral.

Though a local single-structure fire is not the sort of thing that I'd expect to dominate the mundane charts, the real event here is the propelling of Tyler's story into the national news. While writing SMA, I observed repeatedly that stories involving children and gripping national attention characteristically have the Moon on the angles. I was curious whether this was true here, also.

The fire occurred January 20. The major national news stories are yesterday and today.

Of course, the entire East Coast has a Moon-Jupiter conjunction on the MC of the Capsolar. For East Rochester, the Moon is 0°23' from the MC, with Jupiter 0°28' on the other side. How's that for a dignified, ceremonial honoring of a child?

And the new Caplunar, just as the news broke, had Venus closest to the angle (1°35'), and the Moon and Pluto just a little bit off - in fact, Moon is 6°55' above the Descendant, and Pluto 5°42' below (with a distant wisp of Jupiter), so that the Moon/Pluto midpoint is 0°36' from the horizon. Again, all of these planets are appropriate for a news story involving a child that centers (in this case) around his funeral and the bitter-sweet honoring of him.