Johannes Kepler - was born on December 27, the feast day of St.

John the Evangelist, 1571, at the Free Imperial City of Weil der Stadt (now part of the Stuttgart Region in the German state of Baden-Wrttemberg, 30 km west of Stuttgart's center). His grandfather, Sebald Kepler, had been Lord Mayor of that town but, by the time Johannes was born, he had two brothers and one sister and the Kepler family fortune was in decline. His father, Heinrich Kepler, earned a precarious living as a mercenary, and he left the family when Johannes was five years old. He was believed to have died in the Eighty Years' War in the Netherlands. His mother Katharina Guldenmann, an inn-keeper's daughter, was a healer and herbalist who was later tried for witchcraft. Born prematurely, Johannes claimed to have been weak and sickly as a child. Nevertheless, he often impressed travelers at his grandfather's inn with his phenomenal mathematical faculty.[6] He was introduced to astronomy at an early age, and developed a love for it that would span his entire life. At age six, he observed the Great Comet of 1577, writing that he "was taken by [his] mother to a high place to look at it."[7] At age nine, he observed another astronomical event, a lunar eclipse in 1580, recording that he remembered being "called outdoors" to see it and that the moon "appeared quite red".[7] However, childhood smallpox left him with weak vision and crippled hands, limiting his ability in the observational aspects of astronomy. [8] In 1589, after moving through grammar school, Latin school, and seminary at Maulbronn, Kepler attended Tubingen Stift at the University of Tubingen. There, he studied philosophy under Vitus Mullerand theology under Jacob Heerbrand (a student of Philipp Melanchthon at Wittenberg), who also taught Michael Maestlinwhile he was a student, until he became Chancellor at Tubingen in 1590.[10] He proved himself to be a superb mathematician and earned a reputation as a skillful astrologer, casting horoscopes for fellow students. Under the instruction of Michael Maestlin, Tbingen's professor of mathematics from 1583 to 1631, [10] he learned both the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system of planetary motion. He became a Copernican at that time. In a student disputation, he defended heliocentrism from both a theoretical and theological perspective, maintaining that the Sun was the principal source of motive power in the universe. [11] Despite his desire to become a minister, near the end of his studies Kepler was recommended for a position as teacher of mathematics and astronomy at the Protestant school in Graz (later the University of Graz). He accepted the position in April 1594, at the age of 23 Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. A key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution, he is best known for his eponymous laws of planetary motion, codified by later astronomers, based on his works Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome of Copernican Astronomy. These works also provided one of the foundations for Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravitation. During his career, Kepler was a mathematics teacher at a seminary school in Graz, Austria, where he became an associate of Prince Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg. Later he became an assistant to astronomer Tycho Brahe, and eventually the imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II and his two successors Matthias and Ferdinand II. He was also a mathematics teacher in Linz, Austria, and an adviser to General Wallenstein. Additionally, he did fundamental work in the field of optics, invented an improved version of the refracting telescope (the Keplerian Telescope), and mentioned the telescopic discoveries of his contemporary Galileo Galilei. Kepler lived in an era when there was no clear distinction between astronomy and astrology, but there was a strong division between astronomy (a branch of mathematics within the liberal arts) and physics (a branch of natural philosophy). Kepler also incorporated religious arguments and reasoning into his work, motivated by the religious conviction and belief that God had created the world according to an intelligible plan that is accessible through the natural light of reason.[1] Kepler described his new astronomy as "celestial physics", as "an excursion into Aristotle's

Metaphysics and as "a supplement to Aristotle's On the Heavens",[4] transforming the ancient tradition of physical
cosmology by treating astronomy as part of a universal mathematical physics. [5]

Planet
Earth

Average Period Dist. (m) (s)

3.156 x 107s 5.93 x 107 s 0.241 0.39 .615 1.00 1.88 0.72 1.00 1.00 1.52 1.01 5.20 0.99 9.54 1.00 19.18 1.00 1.4957 x 1011 2.278 x 1011

Mars Mercury Venus Earth Mars

Jupiter 11.8 Saturn 29.5 Uranus 84.0

Neptune 165 Pluto 248

30.06 1.00 39.44

Kepler's first law - sometimes referred to as the law of ellipses - explains that planets are orbiting the sun in a path described as an ellipse. An ellipse can easily be constructed using a pencil, two tacks, a string, a sheet of paper and a piece of cardboard. Tack the sheet of paper to the cardboard using the two tacks. Then tie the string into a loop and wrap the loop around the two tacks. Take your pencil and pull the string until the pencil and two tacks make a triangle (see diagram at the right). Then begin to trace out a path with the pencil, keeping the string wrapped tightly around the tacks. The resulting shape will be an ellipse. An ellipse is a special curve in which the sum of the distances from every point on the curve to two other points is a constant. The two other points (represented here by the tack locations) are known as the foci of the ellipse. The closer together that these points are, the more closely that the ellipse resembles the shape of a circle. In fact, a circle is the special case of an ellipse in which the two foci are at the same location. Kepler's first law is rather simple - all planets orbit the sun in a path that resembles an ellipse, with the sun being located at one of the foci of that ellipse. Kepler's second law - sometimes referred to as the law of equal areas - describes the speed at which any given planet will move while orbiting the sun. The speed at which any planet moves through space is constantly changing. A planet moves fastest when it is closest to the sun and slowest when it is furthest from the sun. Yet, if an imaginary line were drawn from the center of the planet to the center of the sun, that line would sweep out the same area in equal periods of time. For instance, if an imaginary line were drawn from the earth to the sun, then the area swept out by the line in every 31-day month would be the same. This is

depicted in the diagram below. As can be observed in the diagram, the areas formed when the earth is closest to the sun can be approximated as a wide but short triangle; whereas the areas formed when the earth is farthest from the sun can be approximated as a narrow but long triangle. These areas are the same size. Since the base of these triangles are shortest when the earth is farthest from the sun, the earth would have to be moving more slowly in order for this imaginary area to be the same size as when the earth is closest to the sun.

Kepler's third law planetary motion. - compares the orbital period and radius of orbit of a planet to those of other planets. Unlike Kepler's first and second laws that describe the motion characteristics of a single planet, the third law makes a comparison between the motion characteristics of different planets. The comparison being made is that the ratio of the squares of the periods to the cubes of their average distances from the sun is the same for every one of the planets. As an illustration, consider the orbital period and average distance from sun (orbital radius) for Earth and mars as given in the table below.

The first law states that planets move in an elliptical orbit, with the Sun being one focus of the ellipse. This law identifies that the distance between the Sun and Earth is constantly changing as the Earth goes around its orbit. The second law states that the radius of the vector joining the planet to the Sun sweeps out equal areas in equal times as the planet travels around the ellipse. As such, the planet moves quickest when the vector radius is shortest (closest to the Sun), and moves more slowly when the radius vector is long (furthest from the Sun) The third law states that the ratio of the squares of the orbital period for two planets is equal to the ratio of the cubes of their mean orbit radius. This indicates that the length of time for a planet to orbit the Sun increases rapidly with the increase of the radius of the planet's orbit

Planets

Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto

Revolution(Days) 87.969 224.7

Mean Distance (Km.)

365.25
686.971

1.0 1.868739206 2.583765112 3.936096718 13.44214161 24.68048359 49.65457685 77.78929188 101.8998273