As the flood of activity associated with the initial planning of Uraniborg began to ebb, Tycho was able to turn some of his attention to astronomical matters. For the most part, that attention was absorbed first by the necessity of exploiting the appearance of the comet to the greatest possible degree and then by the need to put into production instruments worthy of his long-term professional aspirations. But already in 1578 Tycho was able to do enough observing both to obtain some insight into the problems that might arise in doing more extended work on the island and to start accumulating some useful observations. The latter seem to have consisted primarily of meridian altitudes of the sun, for Tycho continued to take about a hundred of them annually. A couple of hundred distances recorded between various stars used as reference points for the nova and the comet seem merely to have convinced Tycho that such work was premature, given the instruments available to him for after March 1578, he made very few observations of either the stars or the planets for the next three years.

As Tycho began to settle into Uraniborg in 1581 and get access to the instruments from his shop, he gradually shifted into being a full-time professional astronomer. The most prominent manifestation of this transition was his expansion into serious nighttime observation.