Tycho Brahe days days in the year pregnant with misfortune, wherefore in Denmark, up to this very day, the laboring class call such days on which they happen to meet with some unfortunate accident, Tycho Brahe's days." In his travelogue "A Poet's Bazaar", Hans Christian Andersen alludes to the fact that Tycho Brahe died in exile in Prague, observing that "Denmark owns not even his dust; but the Danes mention his name in their bad times, as if a denunciation proceeded out of it: 'These are Tycho Brahe's days!' say they." However, no mention of the Tycho Brahe days is actually found in
Tycho Brahe with more prominent stars such as Vega appearing larger than lesser stars such as Polaris, which in turn appear larger than many others. Tycho had determined that a typical star measured approximately a minute of arc in size, with more prominent ones being two or three times as large. In writing to Christoph Rothmann, a Copernican astronomer, Tycho used basic geometry to show that, assuming a small parallax that just escaped detection, the distance to the stars in the Copernican system would have to be 700 times greater than the distance from the sun to Saturn. Moreover, the only way