Astrology, astronomy and the FFL Postcount use UTC or Coordinated
Universal Time. It mostly the same as GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) except
that GMT become BST (British Summer Time) in the summer. UTC does not
change. The process of getting the correct birth time is using the time
zone at the place of birth to get UTC on which the planetary ephemeris
is based. Time zones are the bane of astrologers existence.
I also have a clock radio like that. Your Android phone has the Olson
Time Zone Database on it which has not only current time zone data for
locations all over the world but historical as well. In fact the
astrology software company AstroLabe sued the Olson Database because
they bought the ACS Atlas after ACS went out of business. They thought
that the Olson Time Zone Database was infringing on the work of the ACS
Atlas. However ACS itself was well aware of the Time Zone Database and
didn't see any problem at all. In fact the Time Zone Database which is
open source merely mentioned the ACS Atlas (both book and software) as a
resource for researchers. IOW, ACS sold some extra copies that way
($200 a pop for the software back then). AstroLabe had to withdraw the
suit because the ACS Atlas is based on public non-copyrightable
information. Any judge would have thrown it out. ICANN took over the
Time Zone Database and it is maintained by iana.org.
Some of the minor non OS updates on Android devices are for updates of
the Time Zone Database which kept up far better than ACS or AstroLabe
could ever afford to do. In fact Alios Treindl who runs the Swiss
Ephemeris wanted to buy the ACS Atlas and make it an open source
project. Microsoft which runs on NIH (Not Invented Here) has their own
time zone database which is nowhere near as complete as the Olson one.
Linux and other systems run on the Time Zone Database.
Techies would like to see time zones deprecated. We live in a
microsecond Internet world so time zones are archaic. Techies want UTC
for the world. Think about it. If you want to call friends on the
other side of the world you wouldn't have to deal with calculations to
know their time. UTC is also 24 hour not AM/PM.
On 11/03/2013 05:30 AM, [email protected] wrote:
This morning, a weird dream woke me up at a little before 2am, and my
first thought was that it would be cool to watch my digital
radio-controlled clock shift back to standard time. But, at the top of
the hour, the clock stayed on 2am, and I realized that I had woken up
during the second 1am hour. And, it got me wondering how astrology
deals with the one day of the year in DST areas where there are two
periods of 1:00am to 1:59am. I guess if an astrologer has to deal with
a 1am hour "fall back" morning birth time that doesn't specify DST or
standard time, he'll have to run both charts and see which one is the
better fit. I'd like to assume that hospitals would make a point of
taking note of which 1am hour, but I know from my own birth
certificate that hospitals aren't always focused on recording accurate
birth time.
