Observations
Shi is credited with positioning the 121 stars found in the preserved texts. Shen also made the earliest surviving undated record of sunspot observation, which is sometimes erroneously credited to Gan De. He assumed that these spots were eclipses that began at the center of the sun and spread outward. Although he was wrong, he recognised the spots for what they were – solar phenomena.
His works included the 8-volume Astronomy, the one-volume Celestial Map and the one-volume Star Catalogue of Shi. The latter two are now believed to be written by his school followers. Most of his works did not survive intact, but a few of his crucial writings were preserved in the Treatise on Astrology of the Kaiyuan Era.
Read more about this topic: Shi Shen
Famous quotes containing the word observations:
“All observations point to the fact that the intellectual woman is masculinized; in her, warm, intuitive knowledge has yielded to cold unproductive thinking.”
—Helene Deutsch (1884–1982)
“I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“The natural historian is not a fisherman who prays for cloudy days and good luck merely; but as fishing has been styled “a contemplative man’s recreation,” introducing him profitably to woods and water, so the fruit of the naturalist’s observations is not in new genera or species, but in new contemplations still, and science is only a more contemplative man’s recreation.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)