Unfortunately, after Johannes Fabricius' early death at the age of 29, the book remained obscure and was eclipsed by the independent discoveries of and publications about sunspots by Christoph Scheiner and Galileo Galilei, few months later. After denouncing a local goose thief from the pulpit at Osteel in 1617, the accused man struck him in the head with a shovel and killed him. Copies of a map he made of Frisia in 1589 are also still extant. He is also name-checked in Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" as someone who claimed to have seen lunar inhabitants through his telescope, though that particular fact is merely part of Verne's fiction. The large (90-kilometer) crater Fabricius in the Moon's southern hemisphere is named after David Fabricius. In 1895 a monument was erected to his memory in the churchyard at Osteel where he was pastor from 1603 until 1617.