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Johannes Kepler's Accomplishments

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Johannes Kepler was one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution. Despite him not as well-known as that of his predecessors, Kepler’s discoveries laid the foundation for future discoveries and advancements in the field of astronomy we have today.

Kepler was born December 27, 1571 in a rather small, Catholic town in southern Germany called Weil der Stadt. Kepler was born as the eldest of three children who died in infancy. An early bout with smallpox, the same thing that had killed his siblings, left Kepler with adversely affected vision. This is likely why he chose the field of theoretical astronomy, using mathematics to further his studies, rather than observational.
Later on, he would move to Graz, Austria. There, he would become …show more content…

He wrote the book called “Astronomiae Pars Optica” in 1604. It is believed to be the first modern book of optics. It describes the inverse square law of light, the measurement used for the distances of galaxies and other celestial bodies, he described the process of human vision as well. This was likely inspired by his defective vision granted to him very early on in his life. He would also write the book “De nive sexangula” nine years later in 1611, the first book on the subject of crystallography. Today we know crystallography as the study of atomic and molecular structure, but this book was instead on his thoughts of the shapes of snowflakes. His thoughts on snowflake shape would later prove to help build the foundation for the modern study of crystallography. Galileo Galilei is credited with inventing the telescope in 1610, but it was Kepler who introduced several important improvements to the original design. One of the more obvious improvements would be one that increases the field of view. These improvements would later be the reason that the Kepler Telescope, a spacecraft and telescope that detects possibly Earth-like planets that rotate alien stars, to bear his

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