The house occupied by Kepler in Regensburg had several rooms, including a modern display of the orbital laws. This room still has the original wood walls and floor used by Kepler.
The house occupied by Kepler in Regensburg had several rooms, including a modern display of the orbital laws. This room still has the original wood walls and floor used by Kepler.
An original book and globe used by Kepler.
Some instruments used in the time of Kepler. On a return visit, I need to document these a little better. Since this was my first trip to Europe, I was too overwhelmed to study!
My guide for this quick visit to Regensburg was my cousin's husband, whose father was once the mayor! He pointed out that these bars embedded into the Rathaus (city hall) were meant as standard units. Traders could come here to calibrate their yardsticks or rulers to verify that they were not being cheated by other merchants. Since they were always visible and publically available, everyone had to be honest.
Weil der Stadt is a small town in southern Germany, near Stuttgart. The Kepler Museum and his statue are in the center of the old town.
This great statue commemorates Kepler, with his statute on top, but there are also four other statues in the sides, including Copernicus and Brahe. The museum is behind the statue in the corner of the plaza. The town square was pretty empty, since it was the middle of a week day. A hotel and bakery (of course), as well as the city museum, are nearby.
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Copernicus and Brahe in their niches support Kepler.
This bust of Kepler is at the entrance to the museum. The Stuttgart sculptor Gustav Adolf Breclaw made it in 1930.
On display in the museum are several old artifacts. Heinrich Stolle's scale compass is not a drawing instrument, but a calculation instrument. Stolle, its inventor, was assistant to the well-known instrument maker Jost Burgi, one of Kepler's closest acquaintances in Prague.
This folding sun clock was is annotated with the note “A Kepler 1626”. They were manufactured mainly in Nuremberg.
On the Rathaus in Ulm is a plaque to honor the time Kepler spent here. The dialect is difficult to translate (note the spelling in the name, for example), but refers to the Rudolphine tables that made Kepler famous.
In the Technical Museum was a nice display of astronomical instruments, including a model of Kepler's geometric interpretation of the spacing of the planet's orbits. The regular geometric solids (cube, tetrahedron, etc) are nested and approximate the orbital distances in the solar system.
A close-up of the inner solar system.
A surprising find - Kepler's telescope in the Technical Museum! I had thought that Kepler never used telescopes, but he did write a book on optics. Galileo first used the telescope on Jupiter in 1610, so Kepler did have time to design and use his own.
The subway system in Vienna has one stop on the U1 line named after Kepler, but I walked around the plaza and could find no plaques or memorials, just the street signs.
Kepler lived in Linz for a number of years, but only the house at #5 still stands. Its now used for business and as apartments. I was lucky enough to get a picture just as one truck moved from the parking space in front, and was replaced seconds later by another truck. Some remodeling on an upper floor required some hoses that partially obscured the memorial plaque. His son was also apparently baptized in this house in 1625.
In the courtyard in the middle of the Rathaus was the Kepler Planet Fountain. From what I could find on various web pages, the bronze figures in the middle represent the the Moon, as a nearly naked woman, who holds a Mondsichel in her hand, Mercury, with winged helmet and sign, Venus, as a dressed woman, as a dear goddess with a burning heart in the hand, the Sun, as a man with a jagged crown and a lion at its feet, Mars, as a man in armament with a sheep support, Saturn, as a man with a child to be devoured, and Jupiter, symbolized as the highest divinity and as "rain God". The close-up figures below might be these, but it was hard for me to make sense of them.
On the courthouse was this plaque honoring Kepler.
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