ABSTRACT
Alphonso, King of Castile, had given an impulse to astronomy by employing the best men he could find on the production of a new set of tables, known as Alphonsine tables. The same century had also produced Purbach, who translated Almagest and had a great reputation as a professor of astronomy, his patron, Cardinal Nicolaus von Cusa, one of the many before the time of Copernicus who suggested that the sun might be the centre of the universe. Copernicus was a theorist his observations were of no great value. In Tycho Brahe people find just the reverse. Born of a noble Danish family three years after the death of Copernicus, he was first attracted towards astronomy by a solar eclipse partially visible at Copenhagen in 1560, the year after he had been sent to the university there. Tycho Brahe most important incursion into region of theory, his planetary system, has not perhaps met with even the credit due to it.
