Short answers, pulled from the story.
Tycho Brahe was a Danish astronomer born on the 14th of December 1546, known for producing the most accurate astronomical observations of the pre-telescopic era. His data was used by Johannes Kepler to derive the three laws of planetary motion, and he is described as the greatest pre-telescopic astronomer. He helped turn astronomy into the first modern science.
On the 11th of November 1572, Tycho observed a bright new star in the constellation Cassiopeia, now catalogued as SN 1572 and located roughly 7,500 light-years from Earth. By measuring the absence of daily parallax against background stars, he proved the object lay far beyond the Moon, directly contradicting the Aristotelian belief that the heavens beyond the Moon were eternally fixed and unchanging. He published his findings in 1573 in De nova stella, where he coined the term nova.
The Tychonic model, formally developed in 1587, proposed that the Sun and Moon orbit a stationary Earth while all other planets orbit the Sun. It preserved the mathematical advantages of Copernican heliocentrism while keeping the Earth at rest, and it eliminated the concept of solid rotating celestial spheres. The model gained wide acceptance particularly among Catholic astronomers after 1616 and persisted in some regions until the early 18th century.
Uraniborg was built starting in 1576 on the island of Hven in Øresund, between the Danish provinces of Zealand and Scania. It was the first large observatory in Christian Europe and was inspired by the architecture of Andrea Palladio. The complex included observation towers, an underground observatory called Stjerneborg built in 1584, an alchemical laboratory with 16 furnaces, a printing press, and a paper mill. Nearly 100 students and artisans worked there between 1576 and 1597.
Tycho lost the bridge of his nose in a sword duel fought in the dark on the 29th of December 1566, at age 20. His opponent was his third cousin Manderup Parsberg, and the quarrel had begun at an engagement party where the two argued drunkenly over who was the superior mathematician. Tycho wore a prosthetic nose for the rest of his life; analysis of bone samples from his exhumed body, published in November 2012, showed the prosthesis was made of brass rather than the silver and gold long assumed.
Kepler joined Tycho as his assistant in Prague in the final year of Tycho's life, around 1600. Kepler was a confirmed Copernican and considered Tycho's planetary model mistaken, but he had deep respect for the precision of Tycho's observations and called him the new Hipparchus. After Tycho's death in 1601, Kepler used Tycho's records of Mars to derive his three laws of planetary motion and published the Rudolphine Tables in 1627.