Rudolphine Tables

When the king died, Brahe moved to Prague and became the official imperial astronomer of Emperor Rudolf II.

He wrote in a letter to a Venetian correspondent, impatiently inquiring after the tables: "I beseech thee, my friends, do not sentence me entirely to the treadmill of mathematical computations, and leave me time for philosophical speculations which are my only delight".

It was initially supposed to be printed in Linz, where he resided at the time, but the chaos of the Thirty Years' War (first the garrisoning of soldiers in the town, after which a siege of the revolting peasantry, which almost resulted in the burning of the manuscript) prompted him to leave.

There, after many quarrels with the printer Jonas Saur, the first edition of a thousand copies was completed in September 1627, in time for the annual book mart in the Frankfurt Fair.

[7] For most stars these tables were accurate to within one arc minute,[8] and included corrective factors for atmospheric refraction.

[10] For this purpose, Kepler needed his map to be as up-to-date as possible, and it is remarkable for being one of the first to show the Dutch discoveries of the west coast of Australia, Eendracht Land and Dedels Land; this information was apparently taken from the Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Geographica ac Hydrographica Tabula by Jodocus Hondius II, published in Amsterdam in 1625.

[11] Hondius derived his geographical knowledge of Australia from the unpublished 1622 map of the Indian Ocean by Hessel Gerritz.

[14] Adam Schall von Bell, a Jesuit in China, used the tables to complete a reform of the Chinese calendar in 1635.