The astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) is acknowledged as one of the fathers of modern science. His methodological innovations, his mechanical inventions, and the mass of precise observational data he collected, provided the foundation for the scientific break-through in the 17^th century.

He was born at the manor Knudstrup in Scania, Denmark (now Sweden) as the eldest son in a highly influential aristocratic family. He studied law in Germany but was soon totally absorbed by science: Paracelsic medicine and chemistry, mathematics, astrology – and especially astronomy. After his studies of the nova of 1572, which resulted in his first book De nova stella (1573), he planned to settle at Basel in order to distance himself from the aristocratic milieu and focus on science. But the Danish King, Frederik II, created a position for him in Denmark which united aristocracy and science: From 1576 he ran the scientific institution Uraniborg on his royal fief, the island of Hven between Copenhagen and Elsinore.

Uraniborg became a research centre of European renown. It housed a sophisticated milieu, where poetry, art and music flourished alongside ground-breaking science. Workshops provided the many newly devised astronomical instruments, and soon a printing house and a paper mill were added. At Uraniborg most of Tycho’s main works were printed: De Mundi Aetherei Recentioribus Phaenomenis (1588), Epistolae Astronomicae (1596) and Astronomiae Instauratae Progymnasmata (finished at Prague 1603).

In 1597 Tycho left Uraniborg, and soon after Denmark, as a result of a conflict with the government and the new king, Christian IV. In exile in Holstein he published his description of Uraniborg and its instruments (Astronomiae instauratae mechanica, 1598), dedicated to the emperor, Rudolf II. The emperor called him to Prague, where he arrived in 1599. During his brief residence at the imperial court he met and collaborated with Johannes Kepler, who after Tycho’s death in 1601 based his epoch-making discoveries on Tycho’s observational data.