The renaissance period began around the late1200’s in Italy and spread all across Europe in the 16^th century. Its influence affected literature, philosophy, art, politics, science, religion and other aspects of intellectual enquiry. The renaissance scholars integrated the humanist method in study, and sought out realism and human emotion within art.

Born on February 19, 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus, the first astronomer to formulate a scientifically based heliocentric cosmology that displace the earth from the center of the universe. He published his work “De revolutionbus orbium coelestium” in 1539 which meant “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres” and was regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy. It was the defining epiphany that began the Scientific Revolution.

Although there had been heliocentric hypotheses published centuries before Copernicus, his publication of a scientific theory of heliocentrism, showing that the movement of celestial objects can be explained without placing the Earth at rest in the center of the universe, encouraged further scientific investigations. It became a landmark in the history of modern science that is known as the Copernican Revolution.