Sticking with stars for another thought, prompted in part by the widespread realisation that the positions of the stars have changed since the zodiac  was invented a couple of thousand years ago.  This has actually been known for a long time but it hasn't stopped astrologers pretending to make observations and saying that the sun is in such and such a sign when it blatantly was not.

The net effect is that many people are not the sign they thought they were and astrologers either have to ignore the new information or do some 'splainin' pronto.

I have always* thought that astrology and astronomy should swap names for accuracy's sake, Astronomy is gathering knowledge (ology) of the stars and astrology is just giving names (nomy) to the stars.  However, just as philosophy was the original physics, the struggle to understand the world around us, definitions change over time and it occurs to me that the origin of astrology's soothsaying aspect might have been a funding problem.

This is another uneducated stab in the dark but my reasoning goes something like this.  Gazing at the stars is fascinating but charting them properly and tracking their movements, especially without modern equipment, requires an enormous amount of time and dedication and  it's not very useful unless you're navigating across the seas.  How do you justify spending so much time staring at the sky?  What you have to do is make it relevant to people, convince them that the stars' positions represent vital information for each individual, particularly your society's leaders and they will hopefully fund your project and allow you to work nights.

The whole fortune telling thing could have been a front for the real science of the day.

* not always, just since I realised astrology was a load of bollocks.  I was quite interested in it as a kid.