and on the other hand, it is probable that Tycho's domineering manner first brought about the difference between him and Gellius which led to this unpleasant affair.[1]
During the years when all these annoyances happened to the astronomer, his scientific work continued to be carried on, and the years 1594 and 1595 are considerably richer in observations than those immediately preceding. Most of his observations for determining accurate places of fixed stars were made before the end of 1592, and the results were embodied in a catalogue of 777 stars for the end of the year 1600, which is printed in his Progymnasmata. After 1590 it was especially the planets which were observed (though they had always been regularly attended to), and in 1593 extensive series of observations of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were made. In 1595 observations of fixed stars were resumed in order to bring the number of stars in the catalogue up to 1000, and even in the first two months of 1597, immediately before leaving Hveen, some observations were taken in hot haste to make up the thousand (pro complendo millenario), mostly only depending on a single measure of the declination and the distance from one or two known stars, and sometimes with a rough diagram to identify the star. It must therefore be taken cum grano salis when Tycho already in January 1595 wrote to Rothmann that he had now finished "about a thousand stars," and when he writes in his Mechanica that the great globe was quite finished in 1595, exhibiting a thousand stars.[2] It has been suggested that it was this
- ↑ Gellius married in 1599, became Professor of Medicine in the Copenhagen University in 1603, and died 1612 (Rördam, l. c., p. 31). Magdalene Brahe went with her father to Prague, and apparently never married.
- ↑ Longomontanus says in his Astronomia Danica, p. 201, that the work on the star-catalogue was commenced in 1590, and went on for five years ("Ego . . . huic de fixis cœlitus restituendis negocio et exsecutioni non solum interfui, sed etiam præfui").
