Neither Copernicus, Galileo, nor Kepler had proof

Googling... oh, it was a Tychonic model, where Venus orbits the sun in an ellipse (in agreement with Kepler), but the sun orbits the Earth.

I mean, that's not even a different model, that's just the real thing visualized in a frame of reference centred on the Earth.

Keep in mind that any ellipse can be modelled by 2 epicycles.

Ellipses were a tighter constraint on available epicycle models.

Kepler's model actually involved hyperbola for comets, which cannot be explained by epicycles.

The Copernican system actually had more epicycles than the Ptolemaic one.

But yes, you could keep adding epicycles to the Ptolemaic system and change parameters to match the accuracy even of today's planetary movements.

But epicycles couldn't explain hyperbolic movements of objects that only fly into the solar system once.

I think those are good lessons to learn from the episode, but it should be pointed out that Copernicus' model also required epicycles in order to achieve approximately the same predictive accuracy as the most widely used Ptolemaic systems. Sometimes later, Kepler-inspired corrected versions of Copernicus' model, are projected back into the past making the history both less accurate and interesting, but more able fit a simplistic morality tale.

The many disagreement Karma (-7 as of now) suggest my failed joke was taken quite a bit as a serious statement, which in itself is quite interesting; maybe worth preserving as stats in a thus from now on retracted comment; we're living in strange times!