Prague -- The Fifth Series

Imagine that you are the 16th century astronomer

Tycho Brahe and have fallen out of favor with the

powers-that-be in your native Denmark. Emperor Rudolf II

invites you to relocate your equipment, and yourself, to Prague

where he sets you up in his castle, the Belvedere. You take a 

new assistant, the young and promising Johannes Kepler,

who among his many accomplishments in astronomer is the discovery

that the planets travel in elliptical paths, not circular ones.

Emperor Rudolf often spent evenings with the

astronomers -- sometimes just sitting on the veranda of the castle

and discussing novas, planets, and orbital paths. 

Adjacent to the castle are the Royal Gardens

featuring plants from Italy, Spain, and Asia. 

In the plaza across from Prague's National Theatre

we came upon an exhibit featuring The Year of the Universe

2009. Photographs of earth, the planets, galaxies, and stars

greeted visitors and regaled the curious. Here is Roger

"standing" next to the Pleiades.

Poems accompanied the photographs. Here's one:

A school of frogs sat in the mud.

Their gaze fixed on the heavens.

Old teacher frog did all he could

To hammer home the lessons.