Brahe, Tycho (1546-1601)

Tycho Brahe, sixteenth-century Danish astronomer and astrologer, was born on December 14, 1546, in the town of Skane, Denmark (now Sweden) into a noble family. He received a fine education at the Universities of Copenhagen and Leipzig, and because of his status in life was able to further his studies at other schools in Germany and Switzerland. By the time of his return to Denmark in 1570 he had begun studies in astronomy and alchemy. Astronomy was still in a rather primitive state, and Brahe saw the need of improving the standards of accurate observation. The king of Denmark funded a new observatory, named Uraniborg, on the island of Hven.

Brahe made notable advances during his two decades at Hven. He published several books (some published on his own printing press), designed new instruments for measuring the movement of the various heavenly bodies, and trained a new generation of astronomers. He instituted the regular continuous observation of the planets, making note of a number of anomalies in their orbits. Then in 1597, he had a falling-out with the king and he packed up his possessions and left the country. While disrupting his life, it was a fortuitous move and he eventually settled in Prague, where he would live the rest of his life. There he hired a young assistant named Johannes Kepler who would take the calculations Brahe had made and determined that the planetary orbits were elliptical, not circular. Taken together, the work of Brahe and Kepler did much to destroy the older earth-centered view of the solar system and facilitate the transition to the heliocentric (sun-centered) view.

What is often forgotten, or simply ignored by historians of science, was that Brahe was also a mundane astrologer. Mundane astrology studies the charts of nations that are read much as are charts of individuals. Among the events of most interest to mundane astrologers are comets, and Brahe is remembered for his very accurate observations of the comet of 1577, an enigma of some importance in understanding the fate of Denmark, but which also contributed to the destruction of the Aristotelian idea of heavenly spheres. Brahe also did work on the relation-ship of natural disasters and planetary conjunctions (when two planets come very close to each other in the heavens). This work led to his preliminary understanding of aspects, key angular relations (0, 60, 90, 120, and 180 degrees) between planets as observed from the Earth, at the time still an important part of astronomy. Astronomers tended to focus their observations of planets to evenings when they reached an important aspect. Kepler would take Brahes' observations and develop the comprehensive theory of aspects that is now commonly used in astrological chart interpretation.

Brahe died on October 21, 1601, in Prague.

Sources:

Dreyer, J. L. E. Tycho Brahe: A Picture of Scientific Life and Work in the Sixteenth Century. Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1890.

Kitson, Annabella, ed. History and Astrology: Clio and Urania Confer. London: Mandala, 1989.

Thoren, Victor E. The Lord of Uraniborg: A Biography of Tycho Brahe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.