Tycho Brahe charted the planets by naked eye more precisely than anyone before him, to within about a sixtieth of a degree, and Kepler built his laws of planetary motion on those tables. What people remember is the nose. At twenty he lost the bridge of it in a duel with a cousin, by most accounts over a point of mathematics, and wore a metal one for the rest of his life; when his tomb was opened, the green traces suggested brass rather than the gold and silver of the legend. People remember the elk too. The story goes that he had a tame one, sent off as a gift for a prince, and on the way it stopped at a castle, drank too much beer at dinner, and died falling down the stairs. He got the sky right to a sixtieth of a degree, and what the rest of us kept was a nose and a moose.