Tycho Remnant Tickles The Fancy Poem by Harley White

‘Oh my, what a weird-looking glob of gob! '
was what I first thought when I saw that blob.
Then I embarked on a fact-finding job
into that curious thingamabob.

What to my wondering eyes did appear
when probing that shattered stellar debris
but the "yond same star" spectral scene Shakespeare
wrote for Hamlet's ‘to be or not to be'.

Edgar Allan Poe as well played a role
with his longest poem, now neglected.
Yet culturally, as part of the whole,
astrophysics was the most affected.

When a star blew up in the Milky Way
in the sixteenth century long ago,
it could be seen even during the day,
rivaling Venus in brilliance of glow.

Tycho Brahe of the bushy mustache,
via that fifteen seventy-two sight,
coined the term "nova" and made a big splash
by noting the cosmos in a new light.

Heaven knows he was a colorful guy,
famous for more than his prosthetic nose.
Night after night Tycho gazed at the sky,
with Kepler as the assistant he chose.

In Cassiopeia constellation,
before the telescope was invented,
he spied from Herrevad Abbey station,
through observations unprecedented,

his eponym star, in November found.
Citing celestial positions above,
he kept making measurements from the ground
and penned an extensive study thereof.

The spectacle shook sidereal views
and fixed Tycho's place astronomical.
His writings were thus sensational news
(as was his lost bridge anatomical) .

Now it's known this remnant was created
by the explosion of a white dwarf star.
That supernova type, it's been stated,
can help draft the universe's memoir.

So the research of Tycho Brahe, whose
name became part of the nomenclature
of astral science, has helped unconfuse
human perceptions of laws of nature.

Whatever one sees as a Rorschach test
in the Chandra image we're looking at,
still my ideation that most impressed
was that it resembles a giant splat.