Astronomer, and scholar-minister to the Chinese usurper Wang Mang. He antedated Ptolemy's Almagest (2nd-c AD) with his astronomical tables, and catalogued 1080 stars in six magnitude categories, and calculated the year at 365 385/1539 days. In AD 4 he organized a national scientific congress attended by 1000 scholars.
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Liu Xin (Chinese: 刘歆; In it he provided the following periods:
The Moon phase period (synodic month): 29 43/81 days. A total of 235 synodic months add up to 19 years.Therefore his number of days in one year was 365.25016, which is 11 minutes longer than the current value.
He also created a catalog of 1080 stars, where he used the scale of 6 magnitudes.
A crater on Mars was named in his honor.
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