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. (C) 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim