Planetary Orbits #2: Tycho Brahe
Refer to my blog on the planetary models of the old days. This blog, again based on Kitty Ferguson’s Tycho and Kepler , focuses on the first half of the Tycho-Kepler pair, a Danish nobleman cum astronomer par excellence: “Tycho Brahe was renowned throughout Europe as a prince among astronomers and an astronomer among princes.” Tycho believed that “the future of astronomy lay in numerous and exact observations”. To that purpose, he designed sophisticated instruments, many of which required “highly skilled, specialist instrument makers”. In 1572, he saw a new object in the sky, brighter than any other star or planet: - He determined that it wasn’t a comet. - He figured it lay beyond the Moon, a contradiction to Aristotle’s point that nothing changed in the regions beyond the Moon. He published all this in a book, De Stella Nova , meaning The New Star. An ironic title given t...