Tycho Brahe and his Work

According to Copernicus, the earth has three separate motions. It rotates every 24 hours to make the day and night. It revolves around the sun in a revolution once a year. It also has annual tilting movement of the earth on its axis. The earth’s different motions, especially rotation, was the main explanation for retrograde motion. He also proposed that the distance between the sun and earth is very small compared to the distance between the earth and any of the other stars in the universe.

The six-book compendium that came out of his life’s work was originally proposed as a mathematical theory rather than a true astronomical one. This was an attempt to distance his theories from anything that remotely looked like a threat or challenge to the Church or to the Bible itself. It came at a time when the Church was trying to modify the Julian Calendar and it was said that the book could help do this.

TYCHO BRAHE AND HIS WORK

Most people don’t recognize Tycho Brahe as a famous astronomer. He lived in the late 1500s and was a serious observer of the phenomena in the sky. He was the main force behind the Danish Observatory, which sed sextants to study the skies because there were not telescopes then. He used these sextants in order to measure the different positions of the start and planets, creating a then-modern database. He was a mathematician who used trigonometry to show that the sun was relatively far away compared to the moon.

The idea of a moving earth was confusing to everyone at the time, including Brahe. The earth’s size had been known for a long time and it just seemed to be too big of an object to have any force strong enough to actually move it. Because he couldn’t detect any parallax, he had to assume that the stars were indeed very far away. He tried to estimate the size of stars but couldn’t get around the blurring of starlight in the atmosphere. This led to a projection of their size as being larger than is true.

Brahe also identified that there were differences in the way the inner planets rotate around the sun compared to the way the outer planets rotate around the sun. He went awry when he decided that there was a hybrid condition where some planets orbited the