Tycho Brahe

Tycho Brahe was a Danish nobleman known for his accuracy and comprehensiveness in astronomy and planetary observations. He was well known for being an astronomer and alchemist. He lived from December 14^th 1546 – October 24^th 1601. He destroyed the popular theory of the celestial spheres with precision measurements that had shown the celestial heavens were not immutable as previously assumed by Aristotle and Ptolemy in his De nova stella of 1573. Using similar measurements he showed that comets were also not atmospheric phenomena, as previously thought, and must pass through the celestial spheres. His Danish name is  “Tyge Ottesen Brahe” and he had adopted the Latinized name “Tycho Brahe” at around age fifteen, and he is now generally referred to as “Tycho.” After a number of disagreements with the new Fanish king in 1597, he was invited personally by the Bohemian king and the Holy Roman emperor Rudolph II to Prague, which is when and where he became the official imperial astronomer. He at this time built the new observatory. Here, from 1600 until his death in 1601, he was assisted by Kepler. Kepler later used Tycho's astronomical results to develop his own theories of astronomy. 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. Tycho is known to have the most accurate astronomical observations of his time, and the data were used by his assistant, Kepler, to derive the laws of planetary motion. No one before Tycho had attempted to make so many planetary observations and he is now very well respected for it.