After Copernicus laid out his fancy new theory placing the Sun at the center of the universe, and then Galileo argued so forcefully for it, you would think that any self-respecting astronomer would acquiesce and admit the Earth no longer held primacy in the universe. But Tycho Brahe was a stubborn cuss, and a stickler for good observation. He figured with the more accurate observations he could make with his state-of-the-art observatory, he could prove Copernicus and Galileo to be fools for doubting the long-held dogma that the Earth was the center of everything. Years of careful observation gave Brahe a trove of data.
Then came the hard part: fitting it all into his preconceived notions. There was no way to argue that some of the planets didn't revolve around the sun, but that didn't stop him from keeping the Earth in the middle. His elaborate scheme placed the Sun and Moon in orbit around the Earth, while Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and Venus circled the Sun. Jupiter retained its cluster of moons. The math behind all of this is way more complicated than what Newton would later come up with, but Brahe made it all fit. The two images pictured here are representations of Brahe's imagined universe from Andrea Cellarius's Harmonia macrocosmica (Amsterdam: Apud Gerardum Valk et Petrum Schenk, 1708). In his book, Cellarius non-judgmentally lays out all of the competing cosmographies and leaves it to the reader to decide their comfort level with heresy and science.To see it in person come on in and ask for Rare QB41 .C39 1708.
