In 1609 Johannes Kepler produced the last of his three laws of planetary motion. This represented years of painstaking analysis of vast tables of data of planetary positions in the sky – all recorded without the use of telescopes. Moreover, Kepler did not have access to computers or calculators to help him, and logarithms would not be invented for another 5 years.
At this time many thinkers still assumed that the Sun went around the Earth, although the ideas of Copernicus and others that the planets orbited the Sun were gaining ground after more than half a century since Copernicus suggested them. There was a problem with the Copernican theory – the data from the position of Mars in the sky could not be explained by circular orbits.
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