Stjerneborg
Stjerneborg (German: obsolete star castle ) was a largely underground observatory designed by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe . It was located near his Uraniborg palace observatory on the island of Ven in Øresund . The royal master builder Hans van Steenwinckel the Elder built Stjerneborg for Brahe in 1586 after the latter had discovered that Uraniborg was not big enough for its astrometric precision instruments and that it was located on an unstable, sandy surface.
Brahe gave his new observatory the Latin name Stellaburgi . Both the Danish and Latin names mean Castle of the Stars . Most of the observatory was laid out underground so that the instruments rested on solid ground beneath the layers of sand.
The instruments installed in Stjerneborg included a quadrant with a radius of 1.55 m and an equatorial armillary sphere , with which angles could be measured with an accuracy of up to one minute of arc .
The underground parts were excavated in 1950/51 and later built over with a dome in which public multimedia presentations take place.
In 2005 the asteroid (5173) Stjerneborg was named after the observatory.
literature
- Harry Manos: Tycho Brahe's Stjerneborg . In: The Physics Teacher , Vol. 41, No. 8, 2003, pp. 469-471. doi : 10.1119 / 1.1625206
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Newly increased historical and geographic general Lexicon, Basel 1726-1744
Coordinates: 55 ° 54 ′ 24.5 ″ N , 12 ° 41 ′ 48.1 ″ E