In 1956, the second was redefined in terms of a year (the period of the Earth's revolution around the Sun) for a particular epoch because, by then, it had become recognized that the Earth's rotation on its own axis was not sufficiently uniform as a standard of time. The Earth's motion was described in Newcomb's Tables of the Sun (1895), which provided a formula for estimating the motion of the Sun relative to the epoch 1900 based on astronomical observations made between 1750 and 1892.[6]