Background
Tycho’s father was a privy councillor and later governor of the castle of Helsingborg, which controls the main waterway to the Baltic Sea.
Tycho’s father was a privy councillor and later governor of the castle of Helsingborg, which controls the main waterway to the Baltic Sea.
He studied at the universities of Copenhagen and Leipzig, and became interested in science. He found that astronomical tables based on the Ptolemaic system were highly erroneous.
In his "De nova stella" ("On the new star") of 1573, he refuted the Aristotelian belief in an unchanging celestial realm. His precise measurements indicated that "new stars" ("novae" or also now known as "supernovae"), in particular that of 1572, lacked the parallax expected in sub-lunar phenomena, and were therefore not "atmospheric" tail-less comets as previously believed, but occurred above the atmosphere and moon. Using similar measurements he showed that comets were also not atmospheric phenomena, as previously thought, and must pass through the supposed "immutable" celestial spheres.
Tycho Brahe was granted an estate on the island of Hven and the funding to build the Uraniborg, an early research institute, where he built large astronomical instruments and took many careful measurements, and later Stjerneborg, underground, when he discovered that his instruments in the former were not sufficiently steady. Something of an autocrat on the island he nevertheless founded manufactories such as paper-making to provide material for printing his results. After disagreements with the new Danish king in 1597, he was invited by the Bohemian king and Holy Roman emperor Rudolph II to Prague, where he became the official imperial astronomer. He built the new observatory at Benátky nad Jizerou. Here, from 1600 until his death in 1601, he was assisted by Johannes 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. Furthermore, he was the last of the major naked eye astronomers, working without telescopes for his observations.
In 1572 he observed the appearance of a supernova, since called Tycho's Star. Discovery of this star was a blow to the old school, which believed in the immutability of stars.
His work on practical astronomy of the sun, moon, comets, and planets was the finest accomplished in pretelescope times.
1600 he moved to Prague and came to know Johannes Kepler. His most important accomplishment was the great series of planetary observations which he left with Kepler.
His observations—the most accurate possible before the invention of the telescope—included a full study of the solar system and accurate positions of more than 777 fixed stars, and what he accomplished remains remarkable today.
Tycho was an artist as well as a scientist and craftsman, and everything he undertook or surrounded himself with had to be innovative and beautiful. He established a printing shop to produce and bind his manuscripts in his own way, he imported Augsburg craftsmen to construct the finest astronomical instruments, he induced Italian and Dutch artists and architects to design and decorate his observatory, and he invented a pressure system to provide the then uncommon convenience of sanitary lavatory facilities.