Stargazers who mapped the heavens and crossed out celestial errors—sometimes with a moose by their side. These are stories written in the language of distant light.
Tycho Brahe mapped the stars with unprecedented precision and wore a brass nose after losing the original in a duel over mathematics. He kept a clairvoyant dwarf under his dinner table and a tame moose that wandered his estate. In 1591, he lent the moose to a nobleman's party. It found the beer, drank heavily, attempted the stairs, and did not survive.
In 1925, Cecilia Payne wrote what would be called the most brilliant astronomy thesis ever written. She proved stars were made of hydrogen and helium. The scientific establishment said she was wrong. So she added a line to her own thesis calling her discovery "almost certainly not real." Four years later, a powerful male astronomer published the same conclusion and credited her in a footnote. Harvard didn't make her a professor for another thirty-one years.