Moved to chat as this is getting really off topic. That works to convert to GMT but not to sidereal time which is based on solar time. A sidereal day is about four minutes shorter than a solar day. The extra four minutes is needed as the position of the sun moves in the background of the stars since the earth revolves around the sun. Wikipedia has "GST = 1.00273790935 × UT1" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_time)<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_time> where GST is Greenwich Sidereal Time and UT1 is Greenwich Solar Time. Actually I think that formula is backwards. It seems that everything should be politically correct as no group should be preferred over another. Sidereal time shows no preference to country or apparent time of day. Therefore it should be how we keep time.
As far as spelling - I have always had trouble spelling and I really loved it when someone told me, "If you don't know at least two ways to spell a word, you don't know much". And did you know that Gmail says that Wikipedia is not spelled correctly? On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 11:41 PM, Joey K Tuttle <[email protected]> wrote: > At 20:17 -0600 2009/01/04, Don Guinn wrote: > > > >Maybe we ought to go to syderial time and forget it. > > > > That reminds me of a amusing story worth telling - years ago (ca > 1980) in the Palo Alto IPSA office, we kept a table top clock set to > GMT (since that was the time the APL service in Toronto kept). Albert > Bradley, a summer employee, one day turned the clock onto its left > side. > > When asked why, he replied, "Now it shows sidereal time!" > > He went on to explain that the time offset to UTC was _9 hours and so > it worked out nicely. We were all amused and left the clock on its > side. > > ~~~ > > BTW, I believe "sidereal" is the correct spelling for the astronomical > time... > Etymology of sidereal is from Latin "sidereus" from sidus, sider- = star. > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
