Urania Propitia

Urania Propitia (lit. 'kind/beneficent Urania') is a book of astronomical tables written by the Silesian astronomer Maria Cunitz and published in 1650. As Maria Cunitz was the daughter of both a physician and mathematician, it was her ability to grasp complex mathematics quickly and transcribe her findings as a polyglot that allowed her to do what few women had done before her.

The work served as a simplification of the Rudolphine Tables (1627) by Johannes Kepler, with Cunitz attempting to both increase the accuracy and to simplify the calculations from the original work. While she corrected a number of Kepler's computational errors, her equations also include inaccuracies. Cunitz's work is credited with making astrological tables accessible outside of the era's universities. Cunitz's cosmology combined elements from the cosmologies of both Kepler and Tycho Brahe. Like Brahe, she thought that the Sun and the Moon orbit around the planet Earth, while the rest of the planets in the Solar System orbit around the Sun. In her work, the physics within the cosmos involve ellipticals and aphelions.