Tycho Brahe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe#toc
http://galileo.rice.edu/sci/brahe.html
Tycho Brahe's Instruments
https://www2.hao.ucar.edu/Education/FamousSolarPhysicists/tycho-brahes-observations-instruments
http://www.astro.umontreal.ca/~paulchar/grps/site/images/tycho.3.html
Tycho Brahe's contributions to astronomy were enormous. He
not only designed and built instruments, he also calibrated
them and checked their accuracy periodically. He thus
revolutionized astronomical instrumentation. He also changed
observational practice profoundly. Whereas earlier
astronomers had been content to observe the positions of
planets and the Moon at certain important points of their
orbits (e.g., opposition, quadrature, station), Tycho and
his cast of assistants observed these bodies throughout
their orbits. As a result, a number of orbital anomalies
never before noticed were made explicit by Tycho. Without
these complete series of observations of unprecedented
accuracy, Kepler could not have discovered that planets move
in elliptical orbits. Tycho was also the first astronomer to
make corrections for atmospheric refraction. In general,
whereas previous astronomers made observations accurate to
perhaps 15 arc minutes, those of Tycho were accurate to
perhaps 2 arc minutes, and it has been shown that his best
observations were accurate to about half an arc minute.
Tycho & Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever
Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens
by Kitty Ferguson
Walker Books, March 2002
ISBN-13: 9780802713902
ISBN-10: 0802713904
https://www.amazon.com/Tycho-Kepler-Kitty-Ferguson/dp/0802713904
On his deathbed in 1601, the Danish nobleman and greatest
naked-eye astronomer, Tycho Brahe, begged his young
colleague, Johannes Kepler, "Let me not seem to have lived
in vain." For more than thirty years-- mostly in his native
Denmark and then in Prague under the patronage of the Holy
Roman Emperor, Rudolph II-- Tycho had meticulously observed
the movements of the planets and the positions of the stars.
From these observations he developed his Tychonic system of
the universe-- a highly original, if incorrect, scheme that
attempted to reconcile the ancient belief that the Earth
stood still with Nicolaus Copernicus's revolutionary
rearrangement of the solar system some fifty years earlier.
Tycho knew that Kepler, the brilliant young mathematician he
had engaged to interpret his findings, believed in
Copernicus's arrangement, in which all the planets circled
the Sun; and he was afraid his system-- the product of a
lifetime of effort to explain how the universe worked--
would be abandoned.
In point of fact, it was. From his study of Tycho's
observations came Kepler's stunning three Laws of Planetary
Motion-- ever since the cornerstone of cosmology and our
understanding of the heavens. Yet, as Kitty Ferguson
reveals, neither of these giant figures would have his
reputation today without the other. The story of how their
lives and talents were fatefully intertwined is one of the
more memorable sagas in the long history of science.
Set in a singularly turbulent and colorful era in European
history, at the turning point when medieval gave way to
modern, Tycho & Kepler is both a highly original dual
biography and a masterful recreation of how science
advances. From Tycho's fabulous Uraniborg Observatory on an
island off the Danish coast to the court of the Holy Roman
Emperor, Rudolph II; from the religious conflict of the
Thirty Years' War that rocked all of Europe to Kepler's
extraordinary leaps of understanding, Ferguson recounts a
fascinating interplay of science and religion, politics and
personality. Her insights recolor the established characters
of Tycho and Kepler, and her book opens a rich window onto
our place in the universe.
sam.wormley@gmail.com