Historical Background
The discovery of the aberration of light in 1725 by James Bradley was one of the most important in astronomy. It was totally unexpected, and it was only by extraordinary perseverance and perspicacity that Bradley was able to explain it in 1727. Its origin is based on attempts made to discover whether the stars possessed appreciable parallaxes. The Copernican theory of the solar system – that the Earth revolved annually about the Sun – had received confirmation by the observations of Galileo and Tycho Brahe (who, however, never accepted heliocentrism), and the mathematical investigations of Kepler and Newton. Brahe did not accept heliocentrism because Galileo's observations only confirmed that other planets, specifically Venus, revolved around the Sun, not Earth.
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