All suggestions are welcome! Studying natal charts of famous figures sounds like a great idea, it'll give us a good opportunity to apply our knowledge.
It seems everyone is hot to trot to interpret charts. Like I said before, this is fine except it's going to be very very difficult to do this w/the current structure of studying each sign w/its associated houses/planets for the duration of the sign. Already I'm running into problems interpreting for others in the Scorpio application thread b/c I'm unfamiliar w/some planets and signs that won't be covered until later.
I know that interpreting a chart is loads of fun and I think we can do it too, but the way we've set up the study group (sign/month) makes this difficult. If we want to start chart interpretation right away, we're going to have to learn the basics of each sign, planet and house before we even begin w/aspects, transits, progressions and suchlike.
To draw an analogy (not tarot this time! You guys must be sick of my tarot analogies ^_^).... in life drawing the first thing everyone wants to do is draw the perfectly rendered figure. But that's *never* the first thing you get taught! You have to learn so many things first; gesture, contour etc and then later anatomy, form etc. The early exercises are boring, yes, and they're certainly not something you'd be proud of. But only when you're at a certain level w/basics skills can you hope to render the human figure realistically and produce something you want to hang on your wall.
There's nothing stopping us from trying read charts along the way, but I think we'll need to hold this in check w/learning the basics. Everyone loves to offer their charts and give interpretations, but as I've said before; I don't have the time to do the more boring grunt work (looking up keywords etc) alone.
I'm not trying to discourage reading natal charts here, it's just if everyone wants to be doing this together, I think going through the basics *before* chart reading will be the most effective approach. Of course, if the majority disagrees, I'm quite open to doing the study group a different way, provided that there is support that the different way will work. *Please* don't be afraid to disagree w/me here. I'm just offering up my opinion, and it's certainly not intrinsically the "correct" way of seeing things.
Cheers!