"the same observer saw it again, in exactly the same place, a star.."

Before the invention of the telescope, Tycho Brahe managed to create a chart of planetary motion that is accurate to 1 degree. .

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If you’re wondering like we did, what these manual observations looked like and sounded like, here’s a little excerpt from Tycho Brahe’s notebook: “After [the nova] had thus absolutely disappeared, the place, where it had been seen, continued six months vacant. On the seventeenth of March following, the same observer saw it again, in exactly the same place, equal to a star of the fourth magnitude. On the third of April, 1671, the elder Cassini saw it, it was then of the bigness of a star of the third magnitude, he judged it to be a little less than [the star] in the back of the constellation; but, on the next day, repeating the observation, it appeared to him very nearly as large as that, and altogether as bright; on the ninth it was somewhat less; on the twelfth it was yet smaller, it was then less than the two stars at the bottom of Lyra; but, on the fifteenth, it had increased again in bigness, and was equal to those stars; from the sixteenth to the twenty-seventh of the same month he observed it with a peculiar attention; during that period it changed bigness several times, it was sometimes larger than the biggest of those two stars, sometimes smaller than the least of them, and sometimes of a middle size between them.”

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