Bongbong Marcos's Birth Chart

The Moon opened the date at 27°30′ Aries, crossed into Taurus at 4:57 AM, before Manila's sunrise, and closed at 9°38′ Taurus. In about 44% of charts from the 1950s the Moon changes sign on the birth date, so the switch describes the calendar, not the chart, and stays out of the ranking. Only the Taurus hours would give the Moon its classical exaltation.

Gemini, up at midnight, yielded to Cancer at 12:04 AM and returned at 9:56 PM; in between, every other sign took its turn on the horizon. Virgo's turn, from 4:25 AM to 6:29 AM, spanned both the Moon's ingress and sunrise at 5:44 AM. Births between sunrise and sunset at 5:59 PM make a day chart, the turn coming when the Sun's center meets the horizon.

All six ranked features, weighed by tradition and by scarcity among simulated 1950s births, held from the opening midnight to the closing one. Mars and Mercury, crowding the Virgo Sun, fill the first three places.

Mars ran swiftly from 22°34′ Virgo to 23°12′ Virgo, the faster Sun closing from behind but never reaching cazimi range. Hellenistic writers saw a planet this near the Sun as hidden; combust Mars appears in about one chart in 14.

Mercury slid back from 14°13′ Virgo to 13°24′ Virgo, pulling away from the Sun, and holds three ranked items: retrograde motion (about one chart in 5), combustion (about one chart in 4) and residence in a sign it rules (about one chart in 6). Virgo is also its exaltation in the old tables, a double dignity.

Venus held its own Libra, ending 0°42′ short of Scorpio, as Venus in either home sign does in about one chart in 7. Nothing went out of bounds. Mercury, Mars and the Sun kept declinations within a degree of one another all day, a parallel some astrologers read like a conjunction.

Of nine aspects in orb all day, Neptune sextile Pluto was tightest at 0°01′. Among personal-planet contacts, Venus has the two closest, conjunct Neptune and sextile Pluto, narrowing to 1°33′ and 1°31′, both out of sign. Mercury squared Saturn throughout.

The hour would settle seven more, all involving the Moon. From 3:28 PM it was quincunx both Jupiter and Saturn, themselves sextile, and by the closing midnight the three formed a yod aimed at the Moon, a figure found in about one chart in 11 from that decade; the opening midnight had none.

Without the Moon, the planets span only 118°38′, from Leo's Uranus to Sagittarius's Saturn, with the Moon alone across the gap: the layout Marc Edmund Jones called a bucket, about one chart in 5 for the decade, the Moon as handle. Earth leads through Virgo's four bodies, Neptune alone is water, and five of nine settled bodies are mutable.

Matching only all-day placements leaves the Moon out. The closest pages are Beyoncé, Freddie Mercury, Prince Harry and Warren Buffett, all Virgo Suns, and Freddie Mercury's Venus also sits within a degree of this one.

Once the Lahiri ayanamsa of 23°16′ comes off each longitude, four bodies drop back into Leo, or Simha: the Sun, Mercury, Mars and Pluto. Jupiter lands in Virgo, Saturn in Scorpio, and Venus stays in Libra. The Moon ran from 4°14′ Aries to 16°22′ Aries, all inside Mesha, so the Vedic Moon sign needs no hour, though the lunar mansion does: Ashwini gave way to Bharani during the date.

Saturn moved only 0°03′ all day, so the hour barely shifts its returns. The first took three passes, the middle one retrograde, from February 9, 1986 to November 2, 1986; the second came in one crossing on December 8, 2015. Jupiter's latest return fell on October 13, 2016.

Precise astronomical calculations place each body at both Manila midnights on Philippine Standard Time (UTC+8), with no daylight saving that year, at today's Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Santa Mesa. Aspects were sampled every 10 minutes of the local date; rates come from births simulated at random times and places in the 1950s.