July 29, 2018

Victorious Astronomy


Johannes Kepler used this diagram, featuring a "Victorious Astronomy," to demonstrate his two laws of planetary motion. He could thus explain mathematically why the planets changed their velocities as they moved closer to or farther from the sun.


The diagram appears on this page in Kepler's 1609 book Astronomia Nova.

Reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress.

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