Tycho Brahe Dies in Prague

October 24, 1601

The Danish astronomer with the silver nose, ennobled star-counter to Rudolf II, died after eleven days of agony from a burst bladder at a drunken banquet. His thirty years of naked-eye observations, meticulous beyond anything before, passed into the reluctant hands of his assistant Johannes Kepler, who would use them to shatter the celestial circles of Aristotle.