Daily Hero

Tycho Brahe
(b.1546-d.1601) 

Dear Readers, Raise your hand if you had a pet moose that got drunk, fell down the stairs of your castle, and died. Keep them raised it you employed a midget court jester. And, if you ever had your nose sliced off in a duel and wore a metal replacement nose, you can also keep your hands raised. Finally, if any of you still have your hands in the air, keep them up if you are considered one of the grandfathers of modern astronomy. I didn’t think so.

However, you can start to get an idea of how incredible a man Tycho Brahe was. Born into high Danish nobility, Tycho attended all the great universities of the day including Copenhagen, Leipzig, Wittenberg, Rostock, and Basel. He lived in a time before telescopes, (the first astronomical telescope was introduced in 1609 by some guy named Galileo), but still made important astronomical discoveries.

• On November 11th, 1572 Tycho discovered a Supernova in the constellation Cassiopeia.
• Catalogued over 1000 stars
• Proved that comets are not objects in the atmosphere
• 1576 - receives the Island of Hven from King Frederick II to build an observatory
• 1597 - has a falling out with King Christian IV and gets kicked out of the island
• Moves to Prague in 1599 as the Imperial Mathematician of Emperor Rudolph II
• 1600 - Hires Johannes Kepler as an assistant
• Tycho’s naked eye measurements of planetary parallax were accurate to the arc minute, (a.k.a MOA a.k.a one sixtieth (1/60) of one degree)

Tycho ruled the school when it came to womenfolk too. He fathered eight children and only had one common-law wife who was not of the nobility.

He apparently hated the local peasantry, and by all accounts was a complete tyrant when it came to dealing with them. It is unclear exactly what that entails however.

In death, he was almost more awesome than he was in life. During a massive banquet, he refused to get up and excuse himself to use the bathroom, as it was the height of bad manners to rise before your host did. When he finally got home, he could not sleep or urinate for five days. Then for six days after that he was in some type of delirious stupor at the end of which he finally died. According to Kepler, his dieing words were, “”Ne frustra vixisse videar,” (May I not seemed to have lived in vain).

Clearly Tycho Brahe was an amazing person. It’s uncertain how much of his story is fact or fiction but he is easily one of the coolest Danes to ever grace this earth. Even if he lived a life that was devoid of astronomical accomplishments and discoveries he would still be heroic, and almost assuredly be today’s, Daily Hero.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 26th, 2006 at 1:11 am and is filed under Real Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.