And the light of the Renaissance flooded the Orb, lit arts and sciences and, as an immediate consequence, illuminated astronomy. Thus began the so-called Modern Age, which would end at the end of the 18th century. But for what the Renaissance renovation took place, it was necessary to conjugate various events that stimulate the society in a way unthinkable until then. We can consider the fall of Constantinople like the first one. In 1453, the Ottoman Turks, under the command of Mohamed II (1451-1481), after a siege of almost two months take the city. The fall of The last remnant of the Eastern Roman Empire was a fact. The remains of Greek culture that still stood must migrate to the West and seek refuge first in Italy, and then the rest of the continent.

The scholars and half in diameter with incalculable thoroughness for the time. He also witnessed the passing of a comet in 1577, whose characteristics and movement he studied in great detail. The heliocentric system of Copernicus was not accepted by Tycho, who in turn proposed a mixed model Ptolemaic-Copernican in which the Earth was still fixed in the center of the universe, with the Moon and Sun rotating at their around, while the planets revolved around the latter. Many detractors of Copernicus shared Tycho’s model for not being so heterodox with the traditional astronomical line.

Hence his great work New Astronomy, published in 1609, which includes his first two laws. In the first law, Kepler specifies: “The planets revolve in elliptical orbits around the Sun, which is located in one of the two foci of the ellipse ». The consequence of this law is that there is a moment of the year the Earth is closest to the Sun, the perihelion -occurs on January 4-, and another in which it is the furthest away, the aphelion, on July 3.

Therefore, a good part of the Catholic community continued to maintain and develop the new vision of the universe. But this process has a strong impact on Galileo, who reduces the astronomical research of him, and passes Zodiac, caused by the scattering of sunlight because of of dust particles, and that it is responsible for good part of the existing luminosity on moonless nights. He also calculated that the Earth’s axis of rotation around the Sun was not positioned perpendicularly, but inclined more than twenty-three degrees from the ecliptic. Little by little, the astronomer’s health suffered, and as a consequence of the prolonged periods of celestial observation for so many years, he went blind in 1711, and his son Jacques went on to assume his responsibilities at the Paris Observatory. In spite of everything, Cassini was never a convinced heliocentric, nor did he fully accept the forms Kepler ellipticals for planetary spin. It’s curious, because his own discoveries contributed undoubtedly to confirm these extremes.