Kepler orbit led to Johannes Kepler working on his celestial mechanics. He later became known as the father of calculus. In 1601, Johannes Kepler acquired the extensive, meticulous observations of the planets made by Tycho Brahe. Kepler would spend the next five years trying to fit the observations of the planet Mars to various curves. In 1609, Kepler published the first two of his three laws of planetary motion. The first law states: More generally, the path of an object undergoing Keplerian motion may also follow a parabola or a hyperbola, which, along with ellipses, belong to a group of curves known
Planetary nebula luminosity function Planetary nebula luminosity function Planetary nebula luminosity function (PNLF) is a secondary distance indicator used in astronomy. It makes use of the [O III] λ5007 forbidden line found in all planetary nebula (PNe) which are members of the old stellar populations (Population II). It can be used to determine distances to both spiral and elliptical galaxies despite their completely different stellar populations and is part of the Extragalactic Distance Scale. The distance estimate to a galaxy using the PNLF requires discovery of such an object in the target galaxy that is visible at λ5007 but not when the entire spectrum