Word: tycho
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...everybody except impatient astronomers, they do not seem to occur very often. Each star system, such as N.G.C. 6964 and the earth's own Milky Way galaxy, is thought to average one such catastrophe in about 600 years. The brightest local outburst, thought to be a supernova, was Tycho's Star, which exploded in 1572 and was bright enough to be seen in daytime...
...star shone temporarily ten times brighter than the moon," said Rudolph Minkowski of Mount Wilson Observatory, "and was visible for a full month in the daytime sky. It was . . . one of the three supernovae which have appeared in the Milky Way during the last thousand years. The others were Tycho's star in 1572, and Kepler's Nova of 1604." In Pasadena next day Minkowski's colleague, Walter Baade, announced finding the debris of Kepler's supernova, which for a while shone as bright at its source as 25,000 suns...
...most prominent "nova" ever on record was seen by Tycho in 1572, and was as bright as any of the heavenly bodies except the sun and the moon. The "new stars" occur only as the result of the greatest catastrophes that have occurred within the universe in history, explosions within stars, which may increase their brightness 10,000 times. They sometimes become quite bright to the naked eye, but fade from sight as the disturbance subsides. The one seen by Tycho disappeared after six months. Four or five bright ones have been discovered since the turn of the century...
Four hundred years ago Tycho Brahe, Danish astronomer, desired silversmiths to make him a globe on which should be represented, "with exactitude," the constellations of the stars. Silversmiths made the "undignified fanatic" his globe. It was about twelve inches in diameter; its surface was carved with those bizarre and threatening shapes with which the ancients first identified the golden processionals of the sky. No celestial beast was missing; goat, unicorn, fish, lion, hurrying crab crowds its shining convexity. After the death of the astronomer, his globe became famous in the country that had laughed at its inventor. A succession...
There was a time when men told fortunes by the stars, when Louis XI quailed before the coursing of the planets, when Tycho Brahe observed the passage of a comet and thereupon fore told the coming of a scourge out of the North who should conquer and disappear. So was Gustavus Adolphus preceded by prophecy. So the stars entered intimately into the lives of men, Upon the story of the telescope nations waited in suspense...