Nicolaus Copernicus was born in 19 February 1473 in Poland.

At
the age of 18, he travelled to Italy to attend college and he was
preparing a career in the church. He studied astrology (as part of
his education) that is about reading the stars to learn about future
events since at the time, priests and doctors felt it was important.
An important element of this was astronomy, which is the motion
of heavenly bodies. Most people at his time believed that Earth
held its place at the center of the universe while the sun, the stars
and all of the planets orbited around it, this is called the
geocentric model created by Ptolemy. However, one of the
mathematical problems with this model was that the planets
would occasionally travel backward across the sky over several
nights of inspection. Astronomers called this retrograde motion.

Copernicus had then introduced a new idea called the heliocentric

system that suggested that the sun was at the middle of the
Universe and not the earth, which was strongly opposed at the
time. He has written a short manuscript to summarize his own
idea called A Commentary on the Theories of the Motions of Heavenly
Objects from Their Arrangements. In it, the main points were of the apparent
daily motion of the stars, the annual motion of the sun, retrogressive actions of the
planets effect from the Earths daily orbit on its axis and yearly orbit around the
Sun, which is stationary at the center of the planetary structure. Hence the Earth is
not the center of the universe but only for the moons rotation.