Publication of the Rudolphine Tables

Timeline

1. 1626Linz · LinzKepler had long compiled the Rudolphine Tables following Tycho's dying wish in 1601 and planned to print them in Linz. Garrisoning during the Thirty Years' War and the Upper Austrian peasant revolt nearly destroyed the manuscript and shut down the press, forcing him to carry the finished work to a safer city.
2. 1626–1627Ulm · UlmKepler bought paper at his own expense, hired the Ulm printer Jonas Saur to restart typesetting, and commissioned an engraving of the frontispiece 'Temple of Urania' to his design. Proofreading was extremely strict; he quarreled fiercely with Saur at one point and nearly left the city for another printer, but ultimately continued in Ulm.
3. 1627Ulm · UlmThe Rudolphine Tables were printed in September 1627, containing Tycho's star catalogue and planetary position tables computed by elliptical orbits and logarithms, commemorating the patronage of the late emperor Rudolf II. Kepler adjusted the preface to accommodate the Tycho family's attribution and promptly sent the new book to the Frankfurt Book Fair for distribution.
4. 1627–1630Central Europe · Holy Roman EmpireThe new tables' predictive accuracy far exceeded the Alfonsine and Prussian tables, effectively providing an operational computational tool for the Copernican system based on observation and the elliptical law, and were used by observatories and navigators until the end of the seventeenth century. After Kepler's death in Regensburg in 1630, the tables remained the most widely used part of his scientific legacy.