No evidence for an early seventeenth-century Indian sighting of Kepler's supernova (SN1604)
Abstract
In a recent paper in this journal, Sule et al. (2011) argued that an early 17th-century Indian mural of the constellation Sagittarius with a dragon-headed tail indicated that the bright supernova of 1604 was also sighted by Indian astronomers. In this paper it will be shown that this identification is based on a misunderstanding of traditional Islamic astrological iconography and that the claim that the mural represents an early 17th-century Indian sighting of the supernova of 1604 has to be rejected.
- Publication:
-
Astronomische Nachrichten
- Pub Date:
- March 2013
- DOI:
- 10.1002/asna.201211721
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1211.0467
- Bibcode:
- 2013AN....334..300V
- Keywords:
-
- history and philosophy of astronomy;
- supernovae: individual (SN1604);
- Physics - History and Philosophy of Physics;
- Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 7 pages, 6 figures. To appear in Astronomical Notes, vol. 334, issue 5 (2013), DOI number 11721