Free The Story of Astronomy by Peter Aughton Page B

decorate his observatory, and he invented a hydraulic pressuresystem to provide one of the great luxuries of the time—sanitary lavatory facilities. Uraniborg fulfilled the hopes of Brahe’s king and friend, Frederick II of Denmark, that it would become the center of astronomical study and discovery in northern Europe.
    The greatest and most unusual feature of the building was the many astronomical instruments it contained. There were quadrants, sextants, armillary spheres, parallactic rules, astrolabes and clocks. On the island of Hven there was every astronomical instrument known to mankind, all made by skilled craftsmen and fashioned to the highest quality. The largest instrument was the great mural quadrant that could measure the positions of the planets to within a few minutes of arc.
Nightly Vigils in the Sky
    Night after night Brahe and his assistants searched for the planets and carefully measured their positions in the night sky. Month after month the positions of more and more stars were added to a great catalog of 777 stars—all located with greater accuracy than ever before. Night after night and year after year for 20 years the lonely vigil was kept on the island of Hven. The data were collected for what would turn out to be the last, and greatest, of the catalogs created using observations made with the naked eye, and everything was carefully recorded. But wherewas it all leading? What was the purpose of this great enterprise? The main object was to create a set of tables to record the positions of the stars more accurately than ever before, but it also involved plotting the positions of the planets whenever they were visible—this was in some ways a greater task, for they changed their positions nightly. But Brahe wanted to do more than simply record the nightly positions of the planets. He wanted to predict what would happen in the future as well as what had happened in the past. What he really needed more than anything was a mathematician to study the data and to formulate a new theory that could predict the planetary positions in the future. Such knowledge would be a great bonus to the science of astrology.
    Then Brahe received a great setback to his ambitions. In 1588 King Frederick II died, and it became clear that his son and successor Christian IV was not prepared to patronize the eccentric astronomer any longer. Brahe was forced to continue his work funded by his own resources. He soldiered on for nearly a decade in this way, but in 1597 he finally left Hven and by 1599 he had moved to Prague. It was there that he was fortunate enough to obtain a second royal patron in the person of Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was prepared to pay for the publication of his works. It was also in Prague that Brahe met a much younger man called Johannes Kepler(1571–1630). As we shall see shortly, the meeting between Brahe and Kepler was a famous and significant one, for Brahe found in Kepler someone who was capable of formulating a mathematical theory that would fit his data to the motion of the planets.
The Hypochondriac Mathematician
    Our story moves to Germany, where Johannes Kepler was born in 1571 in the town of Weil de Stadt. Kepler was a small, frail man. He was near-sighted, and he was a hypochondriac. He was always plagued by fevers and stomach ailments. He was also a strange and mystical character who was very interested in astrology, and at least 800 of his horoscopes are still preserved. When he was casting horoscopes for his family he described his grandfather as
“quick tempered and obstinate,”
his grandmother was
“clever, deceitful, blazing with hatred, the queen of busybodies,”
his father Heinrich was
“criminally inclined, quarrelsome, liable to a bad end”
and his mother was
“thin, garrulous and bad-tempered.”
In later life he spent many months trying to clear his meddlesome mother of a charge of witchcraft.
    In 1597 Kepler married