h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In 1961 A book was published written by Guy Murchie. It is entitled Music of the Spheres and is full of little nuggets of information
In it I found the following

"Tycho Brahe was different from the usual playboy... he was such a serious student of astronomy reverently putting on his finest robes to measure the honor the stars, that King Frederick II of denmark presented him with the Island of Hveen near Copenhagen and financed the erection there of the famous Uraniborg( Castle of the Heavens)...where Tycho and his staff made systematic observations of the stars and planets for more than twenty years. Indeed , Tychop is considered the first modern scientist in that he not only built instruments of remarkable accuracy, including a quadrant thirty-seven feet high calibrated to the minute of an arc and a clepsydra which kept time through the steady dripping of mercury, but he repeated every measurement four times, made precise allowance for the errors in his equiptment and even worked out a refraction table to correct altitude angles for the bending of light...Using as many as nine assistants at one time he insisted that every fact be checked and rechecked before it was recorded... A clue to the quality iof his results...a successful measurement of the length of the year to within one second of the modern figure., and the construction of a five foot brass globe on which was engraved the positions of 777 stars"

Also in a time when most believed the planets existed on a series of perfectly transparent spheres Brahe calculated the distance to cometys and decided that they must go right through these planetary spheres casting serious doubt on their nature.