Scientists analyzed famed astronomer Johannes Kepler’s 1607 sketches of sunspots to solve a mystery about the sun’s solar cycle that has persisted for centuries.

But we don’t have to fall prey to this line of thinking. There’s a way to do better, and Johannes Kepler showed us the way nearly 400 years ago. Here’s a story you might not have heard before.

It was not Galileo Galilei or Thomas Harriot but Johannes Kepler who left the earliest datable sunspot drawing. An international team led by Nagoya University in Japan has made a significant ...

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, oil on panel, anon., 1610. (Image credit: Pictures from History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) ...

Kepler's two drawing of the Sun show the sunspot cluster to be different sizes, but agree on the location, which is more important. Image Credit: Johannes Kepler, 1609.

Kepler's Supernova (CTB 41), the last naked-eye visible supernova in our galaxy, was first observed in October 1604 by Lodovico delle Colombe, reaching a magnitude of -2.5. Johannes Kepler, though ...

Kepler read that particular treatise and admired it, having made his sunspot observations using a camera obscura in 1607 (published in a 1609 treatise), which he initially thought was a transit of ...

JOHANNES KEPLER is remembered for writing down the laws of planetary motion. But the 17th-century astronomer also liked to observe comets and, one day, he noticed that their tails always pointed ...