His first great experience had been the awestricken realization that astronomic events could be exactly predicted; his second was of the opposite kind. On 17 August 1563, at the age of seventeen, while Vedel was asleep, he noticed that Saturn and Jupiter were so close together as to be almost indistinguishable. He looked up his planetary tables and discovered that the Alphonsine tables were a whole month in error regarding this event, and the Copernican tables by several days. This was an intolerable and shocking state of affairs. If the stargazers, of whose low company his family so
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