Short answers, pulled from the story.
Johannes Kepler was a German polymath who worked as an astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and music theorist. He is best known for his laws of planetary motion and his books Astronomia Nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae. He is considered one of the founders of modern astronomy and a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution.
Johannes Kepler was born on the 27th of December 1571 in the Free Imperial City of Weil der Stadt. He died on the 15th of November 1630 in Regensburg, just over a month after arriving there to collect money owed to him by the Imperial treasury.
Kepler's first law states that planets move in ellipses with the Sun at one focus. His second law states that planets sweep out equal areas in equal times. His third law states that the square of the periodic times are to each other as the cubes of the mean distances, a discovery Kepler dated to the 8th of March 1618.
Katharina Kepler was accused of witchcraft after Ursula Reinbold claimed she had given her a drink that made her ill. Katharina was held in prison from 1620-1621 and questioned under the threat of torture in Tubingen, but refused to confess and was released on the 4th of October 1621. A distorted version of Kepler's novel Somnium, in which the narrator's mother consults a demon, may have helped instigate the trial.
Kepler published Astronomiae Pars Optica in 1604, now recognized as a foundation of modern optics, describing the inverse-square law of light intensity, mirrors, and pinhole cameras. He was the first to recognize that the eye's lens projects inverted, reversed images onto the retina. In Dioptrice in 1611 he described the Keplerian telescope, which uses two convex lenses for higher magnification than Galileo's design.
Kepler met Tycho Brahe on the 4th of February 1600 at Benatky nad Jizerou and worked from Tycho's closely guarded observations of Mars. Two days after Tycho's death on the 24th of October 1601, Kepler succeeded him as imperial mathematician. He used Tycho's Mars data to derive his first two laws of planetary motion, and his disputes with Tycho's heirs over the data delayed several publications.