Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). Danish astronomer. Brahe developed a passionate interest in astronomy after witnessing the total eclipse of the sun on 25 August 1560. His own observations revealed the inaccuracy of existing astronomical tables and the prevailing Aristotelian conception of the heavens. In 1576 King Frederick II of Denmark granted Brahe an income and the use of an island near Copenhagen, where he built an observatory called Uranienborg. Here he made the most accurate observations possible without a telescope and calculated the length of the year to within one second. In 1597 he settled in Prague, where-he met Johannes Kepler, who later used Brahe’s observations as the basis for his laws of planetary motion.
