The Catholic Church had an influential backer for its views.  The Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe, who was born in 1546, could never accept the idea that the Earth moved around the Sun, and intended to prove the Ptolemaic theory correct. Despite the fact that he was trying to prove something that wasn’t true, he became the greatest observational astronomer since Aristarchus.

     In 1576 the King of Denmark made Brahe the landlord of the island of Ven in the Baltic, and gave him the resources to build a house and an observatory. The telescope had not been used in astronomy yet. Using only a giant quadrant, which was basically a huge protractor made of brass, Brahe made a comprehensive 20-year study of the sky and its objects.

     Brahe was a tyrant landlord, and the King of Denmark eventually had to remove him. He went to live in Prague, where he worked with the assistance of the German astronomer Johannes Kepler. Kepler began studying the volumes of tables drawn up by Brahe, and discovered that the painstaking observations of the planet Mars demolished any notion that Mars traveled in a circular orbit.

     Brahe died in 1601 while Kepler was still researching his observations concerning Mars. He spent five more years, re-checking complicated calculations as many as 40 times to ensure absolute accuracy.

     Finally he was confident that his earlier suspicions were correct: Mars, Earth, and all the other known planets had elliptical paths -- and in defiance of the Church and the scientific community’s strongly held beliefs, they traveled around the Sun. Kepler was then able to draw up his laws of planetary motion, upon which calculations are based to this day.

     Toward the end of his life Kepler was put under surveillance as a suspected heretic, and people even spat at him in the streets. But when he died in 1630, the tide of science was running his way, despite opposition by the Church.