Tycho de Brahe & Johannes Kepler at Pohorelec (Prague)
N 50° 05.279 E 014° 23.274
33U E 456212 N 5548592
Not so far from the Prague castle, at Pohorelec, you can find a modern statuary of two famous Renaissance astronomers, Tycho de Brahe and Johannes Kepler, whose lifes were deeply connected with Prague...
Waymark Code: WM6KCE
Location: Hlavní město Praha, Czechia
Date Posted: 06/14/2009
Views: 208
At the turn of the 16th century two famous European astronomers, Tycho de Brahe (1546-1601) and Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) were employed at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor and Czech King Rudolph II in Prague.
Tycho de Brahe from 1599 until his death in 1601 spent most of his time in the so-called Kurz Summer Palace at Pohorelec, where Kepler worked with him for some time. Both famous scholars (Brahe with sextant and Kepler with scroll of his cosmics laws in hands...) are commemorated by this bronze statue erected in 1984. Brahe died probably of a kidney disease, and was buried in Týn Cathedral (Týnský chrám) in Prague Old Town. Claims that his bladder burst during a heated discussion with his students, or while watching the eclipse of the sun, or at a banquet given by Petr Vok of Rožmberk, are false.
Kepler lived in Prague until the year 1612. Here he articulated his famous laws concerning the motion of the planets on their elliptical orbits, laws which were included in the most famous astronomical work of all time, Astronomia nova, which was published in 1609, thanks to the support of Rudolph II.