Under the Sunbeams
A planet is under the sunbeams when it stands inside seventeen degrees of the Sun but outside the combustion line — dimmed and working at a disadvantage, but still able to act. It is the middle rung of the solar ladder, and the mild one.
The fuller picture
The solar ladder has three rungs below free and one above, and this is the one people collapse into the rung beneath it. Under the beams is the outer band of the Sun's interference: near enough to be washed out, not near enough to be swallowed. The reading is proportionate — the planet still acts, just less effectively, and it registers as a minor negative rather than a grave one. In one worked chart a significator under the beams, retrograde, in detriment and cadent in the sixth is summed up as a sick and begging man, and the point of the list is that no single item on it did that work.
The value of the term is almost entirely negative — it tells you what a planet is not. Combustion is where the serious classical cautions live, and a rule keyed to combustion does not fire on a planet that only reaches the outer band. The practice we follow is careful about this in both directions: a significator sixteen degrees forty minutes from the Sun is called under the beams and explicitly not combust, and so is one at nine degrees forty-one. Reading either of those as combustion overstates the affliction by a whole grade, and the reverse mistake understates it. The distance is worth quoting to the arcminute for exactly that reason.
Authorities do differ at the inner edge, but iHorary does not hide the choice. The app follows Lilly's coherent p.113 ladder: under the beams begins immediately outside 8°30′ and runs to 17°. Two Bryan worked charts imply a wider combustion bracket, above 8°35′ and below 9°41′; that contrary evidence is recorded, but it is not blended into an invented midpoint. A planet at 8°45′ is therefore under the beams here, with the exact distance shown so the reasoning can be checked.
Direction of travel is not in the name. A planet under the beams and closing on the Sun is on its way into combustion; one under the beams and widening has already been through it and is coming out. And the condition compounds rather than standing alone: a classical rule about imprisonment asks for the querent's ruler or the Moon to be under the beams while also in one of the bad houses before it concludes anything, and states no orb figure of its own.
Two things it is not. It is not a statement about naked-eye visibility — the measurement here is the separation in ecliptic longitude, with no test of how far north or south of the Sun the planet actually stands. And it is not a verdict. Under the beams is a condition of one planet, weighed with the contacts, the receptions and the houses like anything else.
In your chart
A planet inside seventeen degrees of the Sun and outside the combustion line is labelled Under the beams in its dossier, on the same Accidental row as its house strength, and the label costs it accidental dignity on the running score beside that row. Where the planet is one of the actors in the question, the judgment engine also records it as its own minor negative piece of evidence, separate from the score, and names the exact separation from the Sun in the sentence it writes.
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