The history of astrology and Redshift 6

As part of my "deep" background reading, I have started to read more about the history of western astrology. I have been skimming through a couple of volumes of Thorndike's History of Magic and Experimental Science - can you do anything else but skim with a work this size? One or two chapters seem very relevant - ones on comets, conjunctions, astrology in general, Kepler & Galieo, for instance. I own one small part of this work - a print to order copy of Volume 6, which is part two of the Sixteenth Century. A quick look on abebooks reveals that a complete set of the original printing could be mine for the princle sum of £300.

My second main source has been a very short book of four lectures on astrology and the renaissance by Eugenio Garin from 1976. This has quite a lot about Albumaser, "Great Conjunctions", Pico's criticism of astrology, and so on. Not perfectly referenced but not bad.

Finally I have been looking through Jim Tester's A History of Western Astrology from 1987. This is actually a pretty good survey, covering Ptolemy in some detail and having another good discussion of Pico. As I dip into Kepler's De stella nova, I keep finding references to all of this type of thing. I hope this means I am on the right track.

I have also loaded my astronomical software, Redshift 6, onto my PC and have been playing around with the diary, which includes conjunctions going bach thousands of years. Moreover, it includes an animation of the supernova of 1604. With a bit of tweaking, this can be amended to show the Great Conjunction of Dec 1603, followed by the 1604 interaction with Mars. I am very impressed with the programme and rather regret not having looked at it in detail before.

The Kepler nova remnant - a Chandra x-ray image taken August 2006