5 stories set here.
Tollund Man was discovered in the Bjældskovdal bog in Jutland on 6 May 1950, his face so well preserved that the finders called the police. He had been hanged with a braided leather noose around 405-380 BCE, aged about 40, and buried face-down in the bog. His last meal was barley-and-flax porridge, eaten 12 to 24 hours before death.
Read the story →King Frederick II of Denmark granted Tycho Brahe the island of Hven in the Øresund Strait in February 1576 with funding to build a state-supported astronomical observatory. The resulting Uraniborg and Stjerneborg observatories operated from 1576 to 1597 and produced the most accurate pre-telescopic positional astronomy in history. The data set was the foundation on which Kepler's three laws of planetary motion were derived.
Read the story →The mural quadrant at Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg observatory was a brass arc mounted on a north-south wall and used for measuring the meridian altitudes of stars and planets. It was the largest and most accurate astronomical instrument of the pre-telescopic period and produced most of the data that Kepler would later use to derive the laws of planetary motion.
Read the story →Uraniborg was the most expensive scientific instrument in 16th-century Europe — an island observatory built for Tycho Brahe at royal expense. He worked there for 20 years, made the most accurate pre-telescope astronomical observations ever, then fled in 1597. The Crown demolished it the next year.
Read the story →In November 1577 a comet appeared over Europe so bright it cast shadows. A twenty-eight-year-old Dane measured its distance and demolished Aristotle's heavens.
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