Nicolaus Copernicus Prussia also resisted the Polish crown's efforts for greater control over the region. "Encyclopædia Britannica", "Encyclopedia Americana", "The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia", "The Oxford World Encyclopedia", and "World Book Encyclopedia" refer to Copernicus as a "Polish astronomer". Sheila Rabin, writing in the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", describes Copernicus as a "child of a German family [who] was a subject of the Polish crown", while Manfred Weissenbacher writes that Copernicus's father was a Germanized Pole. There are additional arguments for Kopernik's Polish descent on his father's side. Kopernik's Y-DNA haplogroup, R1b L51, is found in southern Poland (in Silesia, where his father
Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God Heliocentric model drawn on a large flat board (based on an illustration from "De revolutionibus") standing next to him. The exact location depicted by Matejko is fictional; modern scholars are still looking for the exact location of the Copernicus observatory, and agree that Matejko's portrayal was more of a "romantic vision". Whereas Matejko shows Copernicus on a tower, in reality his small observatory was probably set up at ground level, possibly in the gardens near his house. The main features of the composition include a symmetrical focal point with atmospheric perspective around the subject, a radial balance of light arranged