Tycho Brahe

Tycho Brahe was one of the most accomplished astronomers of the sixteenth century. His likeness features in Andreas Cellarius‘ celestial atlas. One of his biggest accomplishments was his production of an updated star catalogue to replace Claudius Ptolemy’s ‘Almagest’. The book recorded the positions of 1006 stars without the aid of a telescope and became the basis of Johann Bayer’s ‘Uranometria’.

In 1577, Brahe tracked the pathway of the Great Comet, which inspired him to formulate the Tychonic system. He theorised that heavenly spheres were not ‘crystalline’ structures but were penetrable. Aided by the King of Denmark, in 1580, Brahe built an observatory named ‘Uraniborg’, after Urania, the Muse of Astronomy. Uncomfortable with heliocentrism, Brahe maintained a geocentric model of the universe throughout his career.