Look Up Before You Look It Up: Cloudette & Carson Coughlin on Skystrology

"Look up before you look it up."

It's the guiding principle behind a practice that's quietly dismantling everything most people assume about astrology—and it comes from an unexpected source: a French hat designer who fell in love with the Egyptian sky while caring for her mother with dementia.

In a wide-ranging conversation hosted by humankind, Chapeau Cloudette and Carson Coughlin wove together personal story, astronomical precision, and a kind of stargazing that feels both ancient and radically new. Their event, Above & Within, introduces Skystrology and Sky Astronomy—practices grounded not in apps or ephemerides, but in the direct, observable night sky.

What happens when you discover astrology isn't astronomical?

For Cloudette, the realization came in 2012. "I followed astrology to the T," she explained. "I had my first astrology reading for my 20th birthday present." But when she learned that Western astrology's zodiac no longer matches the actual positions of stars and constellations—offset by nearly 2,000 years of axial precession—she was devastated.

"I was quite upset," she said, "because what I thought was telling me what was in the living sky... was actually based on a 2,000-year-old system."

The discovery sent her on a 10-year research journey. She studied biodynamic farming with Scottish farmers who used the sky to guide planting cycles. She moved to Egypt's Red Sea. And she began tracking the sky herself—not through astrology apps, but through direct observation under some of the clearest, darkest skies on Earth.

Carson's awakening came differently but led to the same place. A screenwriter, poet, and actor, he'd just begun offering Western astrology readings in 2020 when he stumbled onto Cloudette's work on Instagram. "I didn't know that the astrology placements weren't astronomical," he admitted. "With the ephemeris and how detailed it was, I just assumed that it was."

The realization stopped him in his tracks. "I can't do Western astrology anymore. I have to focus on this. This is the ancient future."

How do you learn to read a sky you've been taught to ignore?

In 2024, Carson traveled to Egypt to study one-on-one with Cloudette for seven weeks. What followed wasn't theory—it was assignment-based immersion.

"You would send me out on assignment to the Egyptian sky at night," Carson recalled, "maybe at 3 a.m., or 2 a.m.... I would have to adjust my schedule to be alert at these times." He'd stargaze at specific constellations and stars, then draw them—sometimes in complete darkness. "Direct observation," he said. "I still remember Scorpio."

Scorpio became a teaching moment. In Western astrology, each zodiac sign occupies an even 30-degree slice. But when you actually look up, Scorpio is huge in the sky—and only a small portion (about six and a half degrees) actually touches the ecliptic, the band where the sun, moon, and planets travel.

"Once you see Scorpio asterism with all the stars... you can't ignore it," Cloudette said. "There are no borders in our sky. That's what's so powerful about Sky Astronomy."

Carson also developed a relationship with Vega, the bright star in the constellation Lyra. "It just was talking to me," he said. "It was communicating with me in a way that my mind couldn't really comprehend... I couldn't stop the relationship that we had."

Months later, when Cloudette developed a new tool—skygazism.org, a free web app that calculates key natal stars using astronomical data—Carson discovered that Vega was one of his four primary stars. "I didn't know this," he said. "There was no way for me to know."

That's the magic Cloudette holds space for: not telling students what a star means, but letting them discover it. "I make a point not to say things," she explained. "A lot of people now are telling you what a star means. I find that detrimental. This is a relationship that is for you to have with that star."

Why has this knowledge been hidden—or lost?

Both speakers touched on a thread that runs deeper than astronomical drift: the deliberate severing of indigenous sky knowledge.

"I do see it as a decolonized approach to astrology," Cloudette said. She pointed to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, considered the first astronomers, with 65,000 years of celestial observation. "The colonizers did not want the people to continue having a relationship with the sky, with their ceremonies, with their stargazing."

Carson added historical context: "In the Middle Ages, it was illegal to do astronomy, astrology—what was the same, the word meant the same thing up until about 500, 600 years ago. It was illegal to track the stars... only for the royalty."

"That really tells me the power of true star tracking," he said. "There's power there, that for some reason we've been guided away from."

Cloudette's work isn't just about correcting charts. It's about reclaiming access. "The sky has been waiting for us," Carson said. "The sky is waiting for us to look up. It's not going anywhere."

For viewers ready to begin that relationship, the invitation is simple: tonight, step outside. Before you open an app, before you Google what a star "means," just look. Notice what draws you. Let yourself feel the pull of a particular light.

"Look up before you look it up," Cloudette said. "Nothing comes between me and my stars. And I invite everyone to take that same view."

Right now, Venus is blazing in the evening sky—bright, unmistakable, moving slowly through the stars of Leo. Western astrology says it's in Virgo. Your eyes will tell you otherwise.

Watch the full conversation to hear Cloudette and Carson go deeper into Sky Astronomy, their free tools at skygazism.org, and what it means to let the sky be your teacher. Their school community is open and free to join—no middleman required.

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