On a special episode of Looking Up, host Dean Regas tests a new format as he investigates the mysterious 1601 death of astronomer Tycho Brahe. Science writer Dava Sobel, comedian and actor Thomas Lennon, and WVXU newsroom members Tana Weingartner, Maryanne Zeleznik, Becca Costello, Bill Rinehart, and Jennifer Merritt join the search for answers. Part II publishes Oct. 23, 2026.
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Episode Transcript: Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
Dean Regas: Tonight, on Looking Up...
Character 1 (Tana Weingartner): Tycho Brahe was an astronomer full of life one moment ...
Character 2 (Maryanne Zeleznik): He was always the life of the party. So outrageous!
Character 3 (Becca Costello): He had his own castle, a pet elk, a clairvoyant jester, and had part of his nose cut off in a duel.
Dean Regas: But that night, at a party, something happened. Something he would never recover from.
A preeminent astronomer. A nobleman. One of the richest men in Europe.
Character 3 (Becca Costello): Tycho Brahe had vital information that everyone wanted.
Character 4 (Jennifer Merritt): There was so much at stake.
Character 1 (Tana Weingartner): The secrets to the universe were in his possession.
Dean Regas: A few days later, he said his final words.
Tycho Brahe (Thomas Lennon): Ne frustra vixisse videar.
Dean Regas: Meaning “May I not seem to have lived in vain.” Then he was gone.
What happened to Tycho Brahe? Was his sudden death natural, or foul play? Who was this larger-than-life figure? And who, perhaps, had everything to gain from his passing?
From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio, I’m your host, Dean Regas, and this is “Looking Up”!
Tonight we’re going back in time more than 400 years. To examine, in our own way, the mysterious death of an astronomer. And why, four centuries later, historians dug up his body for a second time. Oh yes, this is a tale that changed the entire universe.
Dean Regas: Prague in 1601 was a lovely place. Situated along the Vltava River, with its many bridges and old town city life. Well, it probably was newer back then, 400-plus years ago. Anyway, Prague wasn’t so appealing for Tycho Brahe.
Character 2 (Maryanne Zeleznik): He was the foremost astronomer in Europe at this time!
Character 1 (Tana Weingartner): He compiled the most data on stars, planets and comets, more than anyone before him.
Dean Regas: Tycho Brahe was hands-down the most prolific and accomplished astronomer in just before the invention of the telescope. He scanned and charted the skies for more than 20 years, from his observations of a supernova in 1572 to the founding of his own observatory.
But Prague was not his home. In fact, this Danish nobleman was in a sort of self-imposed exile. To find out why, we have to go back to the start.
Tycho Brahe was born into the crossroads of several wealthy Danish families. And he lived one of the most unusual lives in the Renaissance.
Born in 1546, the drama started right away. When Tycho was 2 years old, his uncle just took him from the house. Essentially kidnapping him. But strangely enough, his parents didn’t seem to mind.
Parent 1 (Becca Costello): “Where’s Tycho?”
Parent 2 (Bill Rinehart): “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe with his uncle.”
Character 3 (Becca Costello): “Oh, that’s nice ... I’m sure he’ll be fine.”
Dean Regas: He went to school, immersed in relative luxury.
Dava Sobel: He also had tremendous advantages and was wealthy and of the nobility, so he could devote himself to something unremunerative like astronomy, which he did.
Dean Regas: That’s science writer Dava Sobel. Another detective on this case.
Dava Sobel: And because he was really paying attention, he witnessed things that aroused him to great creativity, I think.
Dean Regas: After observing a solar eclipse, Tycho became fascinated with how astronomical events could be predicted. Yet drama seemed to follow him at every turn.
When he was 20, in college, at the University of Rostock, he got into an argument with another nobleman, perhaps his third cousin, about who was the better mathematician. It got so heated that the two took it outdoors to settle it over swords.
Tycho Brahe (Thomas Lennon): You don’t know what you’re talking about. That formula is so 15th century.
Cousin (Bill Rinehart): I could out-math you any day of the week.
Tycho Brahe (Thomas Lennon): You’re dreaming, cousin. You like an obtuse angle, never right!
Bill Rinehart (cousin): Want to take this outside?
Tycho Brahe (Thomas Lennon): Let’s go. Your math stinks so badly my nose can’t take it in here.
Dean Regas: Being a cold, dark December night, visibility very low, and swords flying wildly, Tycho was slashed across the face and even lost the tip of his nose.
Dava Sobel: Well, he’s famous, as I’d say as famous as Cyrano with regard to his nose, because that seems to be the thing people know about him, that he was involved in this youthful duel and got a piece of his nose lopped off; it wasn’t the end of his nose, it was actually at the bridge. So it must have been an obvious deformity, and he was self-conscious about it.
Dean Regas: In later years he wore a variety of prosthetic noses. They were made of metal. Either brass, silver or gold.
Tycho Brahe (Thomas Lennon): How does this nose look?
Character 4 (Jennifer Merritt): Looks good, boss. You can’t even tell.
Dean Regas: I never thought of it before, but maybe that’s why he took up astronomy. He could be in the dark with his nose off and no one would know!
Tycho’s reputation as an astronomer of note came with a new star. He was walking home one dark November night when he looked up at the familiar constellations like Cassiopeia.
But what was that? An extra star. A star so bright that it changed the outline of the familiar queen constellation.
Tycho Brahe (Thomas Lennon): “On the eleventh of November, in the evening after sunset, while gazing at the stars in a clear sky, as per my custom, I noticed a new and unusual star shining brightly just above my head. To me who, almost since childhood, had known all the stars of the sky perfectly (for there is no great difficulty in this skill), it was quite evident that there had never been any in that place before or, at least, no star of such conspicuous brightness. In the event, I was led to wonder whether, indeed, I could trust my own eyes.”
Dean Regas: He rushed to the observatory to investigate. Now this was in 1572, more than 30 years before the invention of the telescope. Tycho could only take measurements using his naked eye and a series of quadrants, but the data he obtained was remarkably accurate.
Brahe looked at the new star, what we call a supernova today, and determined something extraordinary.
Dava Sobel: So one of the first important things he saw was a nova, which any of us would prob give a tooth to see, but he actually just looked up and saw it happening. And that made him realize that the whole idea that the heavens were immutable was wrong. That there could be change. And that was a tremendous bit of understanding.
Dean Regas: So what? Well, most astronomical experts took it as fact that the heavens were unchanging. And here, Brahe witnessed and observed a new star in Cassiopeia.
Tycho Brahe (Thomas Lennon): “I frankly confess that I cannot affirm anything about its generation and for what reasons it would have existed, but shall address only those topics that pertain to the domain of mathematics. Thus, I shall speak of its longitude and latitude position relative to the fixed stars and the zodiac, of its distance from the Earth as well as its size, brightness and color. Also, regarding the effects of this star, I shall submit the predictions of astrology.”
Dean Regas: Well, let’s hold off on astrology for now. Stick to astronomy, please. Brahe detailed how bright the new star appeared and how it faded over the next several months. And it twinkled. Like stars and unlike planets.
What about a comet?
Tycho Brahe (Thomas Lennon): “For he thinks that he observed a comet above the moon, in the sphere of Venus.”
Dean Regas: Oh, so now you’re referring to yourself in the third person.
Tycho Brahe (Thomas Lennon): Ya. He is. I mean, I am. OK, where was I? “Whether this can happen is not yet clear to us, but if, God willing, a comet occurs sometime during our age, let us investigate this assertion.”
Dean Regas: In 1576 King Frederick II of Denmark gave Brahe the island of Hven to set up an observatory. There Brahe built an exquisite castle and ruled the entire island (people and all).
Dava Sobel: Yes, it was a castle, Uraniborg, the realm of the heavens, and it was altogether his. Again, he was wealthy and of noble births, so he had servants to do anything he wanted done. And the place was large enough for him to house these gigantic instruments. I think some of them were placed on balconies of the castle.
Dean Regas: He then constructed an underground observatory called Stjerneborg (star castle), where he and visiting astronomers, including his trailblazing sister and scientist Sophie, observed the sky for more than 20 years.
Dava Sobel: And then later he saw a comet.
Dean Regas: In November 1577, a comet of stunning brilliance and size appeared over the northern hemisphere. Observers around the world noted the comet was almost as bright as the moon and had a tail that spanned one-sixth of the sky.
Dava Sobel: And the way the comet moved proved to him that it was very distant. Its motion was proof that the heavens couldn’t really consist of these celestial spheres people seemed to think were up there.
Dean Regas: Tycho got right on the observations and, improving on his techniques from the supernova five years earlier, measured the comet’s size and distance.
This led Brahe to formulate a third theory for the solar system. A hybrid system. The Earth still sat in the center of the universe, unmoving.
Dava Sobel: Tycho was not convinced that the Earth was moving. But because he had gotten rid of the celestial spheres, he had a way to reconfigure everything so that the Earth stayed at the center. The moon went around the Earth, and the sun went around the Earth carrying the other planets.
Dean Regas: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn (the only known planets at the time) all circled the sun. While they all circled the Earth. OK, if that sounds confusing, it is.
Dava Sobel: And that was his picture. Beyond that were only the fixed stars.
Dean Regas: But it actually works, as in it fits the data of the time just as well as the purely ancient model and that of Copernicus.
Under Tycho’s rule, his island observatory, Uraniborg, became a gathering place of astronomical minds and helped train the next generation of astronomers. Tycho and his team were collecting so much data on the positions of stars and the motions of the planets that Uraniborg basically became the data collection center of astronomical knowledge.
But life in the castle got complicated. Well, let’s say Tycho’s eccentric lifestyle combined with his dictatorial management style led to cracks forming in his perfect island.
Character 2 (Maryanne Zeleznik): For example, Tycho had a team doing alchemy in the basement. He employed a dude named Jepp as a jester and fortune teller. And most oddly had a pet elk.
Character 3 (Becca Costello): Yeah, this elk would wander around like a pet dog, and one day, it got into the beer, got drunk, fell down the steps and died.
Dean Regas: Parties aside, two very big problems cropped up on the island of Hven: money and power. Apparently, Brahe wasn’t very popular among the people he ruled on Hven. He basically treated them all like staff or worse.
Character 1 (Tana Weingartner): Eventually, Tycho lost funding after falling out of favor with the king of Denmark. Left with no other options, Tycho abandoned the island and headed back to the mainland.
Dean Regas: There, he would search for new patrons to his astronomical cause.
But what became of his observatory and castle on Hven? I’ve seen drawings of it, and I’d love to visit someday. Unfortunately, it is completely gone. Destroyed after he left, some say, by the very peasants he ruled with an iron fist.
Dean Regas: Kicked off his island, where could Tycho go?
Character 2 (Maryanne Zeleznik): Tycho wandered around after his time on the island, eventually ending up in Prague.
Character 4 (Jennifer Merritt): Yeah, and that’s where he became the imperial court astronomer to Rudolf II, the Holy Roman emperor. Not bad!
Dean Regas: It was in Prague that he employed an up-and-coming mathematician to help go through the mounds and mounds of data he collected on Hven.
Enter Johannes Kepler. And here is where the plot thickens. Brahe dies under extremely suspicious circumstances. Who ended up gaining the most?
Johannes Kepler: Me, of course. Johannes Kepler.
Dean Regas: Next time on “Looking Up,” “A Death in Prague.”
Character 2 (Maryanne Zeleznik): Johannes Kepler would do almost anything to get his hands on Tycho Brahe’s data.
Character 4 (Jennifer Merritt): Brahe’s observations of Mars alone, in Kepler’s mathematical mind, could change the course of astronomy history.
Character 3 (Becca Costello): But Brahe wouldn’t share everything. Maybe Brahe distrusted Kepler. Maybe for good reason.
Johannes Kepler (Matthias Schmitt): If only I had the data to wage my war on Mars. How can I wrest it from his clutches?
Dean Regas: “Looking Up With Dean Regas” is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. Kevin Reynolds and I created the podcast in 2017. Ella Rowen and Carlos Lopez Cornu produce and edit our show and were like, “Dean, let’s totally do a true crime episode.” So far so good, right? Right?
Special thanks to our voice actors, who are all from the WVXU newsroom here in Cincinnati: Maryanne Zeleznik, Tana Weingartner, Jennifer Merritt, Becca Costello and Bill Rinehart. Big thanks to astronomy educator Matthias Schmitt, who brings Johannes Kepler more in our next episode. As well as our guest expert, Dava Sobel. And portraying Tycho Brahe with such flair, we must thank actor, writer and friend of the show Thomas Lennon, who is slowly paying off his debt to science. This was a great start, Thomas!
Jenell Walton is our vice president of content, and Ronny Salerno is our digital platforms manager. Our theme song is “Possible Light” by Ziv Moran. And our cover art is by Nicole Tiffany.
I’m Dean Regas. Keep Looking Up!
