Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The author has written a very interesting historical recounting of the observation of Kepler's supernova in 1604.  The author describes the discovery and communication between western astronomers along with conjectures of what the supernova actually was.  This is an example of where much bias occurred with some conjectures at odds with the philosophy of Aristotle (and the church) and astrology.  The author has also included observational information from Chinese and Korean astronomers.

In the end, the author has produced a well written, informative, and entertaining manuscript about this historic visual observation of which there are but only a handful in the human record.  The only issue that may need to be addressed is that this may not be a research article but maybe better described as a review article.

My following suggestions on edits are small ones that just caught my eye as I was reading the manuscript.

1.  The citations were not in numerical order.
2.  There were some issues with the open and closed quotes.  A non-exhaustive list are:
   1. 3rd paragraph, sec. 2.2 'new'
   2. page 9, 2nd paragraph, ''some kind..."
   3. page 11,  2nd paragraph, ''perhaps''
   4. page 12, 1st paragraph, 'Aristolelian'
   5. page 12, 8th paragraph, ''Why did the nova..."
   6. page 12, 9th paragraph, "who or what decided..."
   7. page 14, the second footnote, "in the morning..."
   8. page 17, the 3rd paragraph in sec. 4.3, "it was seen in..."
   9. page 19, citation [16], "A Deep Chandra..."
3. Page 14, the first sentence of sec. 4.1 needs a period.
4. Page 17, in the last bullet point, the unit "mag" is in italics but no where else.
5. Page 14, the last bullet, 'In' does not need to be capitalized.
6. Page 13, "risult" should be changed to "result"
7. At the end of page 10, there is a statement of two different beliefs.  Should these two different beliefs described by bullet I. and bullet II. be indented for easier reading?
8. There is a Figure 1, Figure 2, Figure 3, and then a Figure 6, and Figure 7.
9. I don't think Fig 6. is referenced in the body of the narrative.

The last thing is a style issue that I am not sure is an issue at all.  Many times there is basically a table such as in Sec 3.2 of human events, in Sec 3.3 there are four tables associated with the Fiery Trigon, in Sec 3.6 the two table associated with  position of the nova, etc.  I think these tables are meant by the author to be read linearly in the text.  I am not really sure if they should be tables that are referenced in the text.  I just find it unusual to be reading along and then assume that the table fits right into the narrative.   Again, simply a stylistic issue on my behalf.

Author Response

First of all, I thank the referees: I am convinced that thanks to their suggestions the paper has improved.

I took into account all comments from Referee 1. Related to the tables, now they just became tabular arrangements of the text; I removed two of them.

According to the request of Referee 2, I added a section on Conclusions. To justify this, I added a new Figure 8 summarizing some of the modern data.

Reviewer 2 Report

The refereed paper presents an extremely detailed and very interesting description
of observations of the historical supernova SN 1604.
The authors study and discuss in detail all available data from both European and Asian observations.
The results of these observations are interpreted by the authors in modern terms.
The paper presents detailed positional and photometric information on supernova SN 1604,
the light curve is obtained and interpreted, and the astrophysical parameters of the supernova are determined.
In my opinion, the paper would have been improved if the authors had added a short Conclusion,
summarizing the main results of their study.
The paper can be published in the Universe journal.

A typo: Page 2: The event event

Author Response

First of all, I thank the referees: I am convinced that thanks to their suggestions the paper has improved.

I took into account all comments from Referee 1. Related to the tables, now they just became tabular arrangements of the text; I removed two of them.

According to the request of Referee 2, I added a section on Conclusions. To justify this, I added a new Figure 8 summarizing some of the modern data.