Blow Out the Candles Feb 19

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Renaissance astronomer and well, Renaissance man Nicolaus Copernicus was born on this date in 1473.

2010 Allen & Ginter's

From the University of Tennessee:

In a book called On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies (that was published as Copernicus lay on his deathbed), Copernicus proposed that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the Solar System. Such a model is called a heliocentric system. The ordering of the planets known to Copernicus in this new system is illustrated in the following figure, which we recognize as the modern ordering of those planets.

The Copernican Universe

In this new ordering the Earth is just another planet (the third outward from the Sun), and the Moon is in orbit around the Earth, not the Sun. The stars are distant objects that do not revolve around the Sun. Instead, the Earth is assumed to rotate once in 24 hours, causing the stars to appear to revolve around the Earth in the opposite direction.

Actress Merle Oberon was born on this date in 1911.

1934 Player's Film Stars #35

Merle is best know for roles in the 1930's films, The Private Life of Henry VIII, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Dark Angel (for which she received and Oscar nomination), and Wuthering Heights.