one of my neighbors is an astronomer. When I met him, I made a joke about mixing up astronomy and astrology only to find he was really into astrology as well and I learned much that day
so much of astronomy was originally developed for the purpose of astrology - if it wasn’t for astrology, it probably would have taken us a lot longer to figure out that the solar system was heliocentric, because there would have been less interest in taking these precise measurements of the heavens and fitting them to mathematical models. the leap of “holy shit, all these wacky back-and-forth orbits become simple ellipses when you consider everything orbiting the sun” was a lot easier to make when so many people were already staring at the wacky back-and-forth orbits all day.
on the flip side, it’s now really unintuitive for modern people to understand the logic behind astrology, because we’re trained in a heliocentric model from childhood. the concept “mercury in retrograde” sounds kind of silly, because what the fuck, mercury doesn’t decide to just orbit backwards every so often. you have to perform this mental change-of-basis from “super simple ellipse land” to “wacky back and forth land” to reconcile the models, which can be pretty fun when you get the hang of it.