Today is the 467 birthday of the Astronomer Tycho Brahe.
As an astronomer, Tycho worked to combine what he saw as the geometrical benefits of the Copernican system with the philosophical benefits of the Ptolemaic system into his own model of the universe, the Tychonic system. Furthermore, he was the last of the major naked eye astronomers, working without telescopes for his observations.
Tycho Brahe was granted an estate on the island of Hven and the funding to build the Uraniborg, an early research institute, where he built large astronomical instruments and took many careful measurements, and later Stjerneborg, underground, when he discovered that his instruments in the former were not sufficiently steady. On the island (on which he demonstrated autocratic character and behavior toward the residents) he founded manufactories such as paper-making to provide material for printing his results.
After disagreements with the new Danish king Christian IV in 1597, he was invited by the Bohemian king and Holy Roman emperor Rudolph II to Prague, where he became the official imperial astronomer. He built the new observatory at Benátky nad Jizerou. Here, from 1600 until his death in 1601, he was assisted by Johannes Kepler who later used Tycho's astronomical data to develop his three laws of planetary motion.
*From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
0 commentaires:
Post a Comment