On 2015-03-06 11:04, Brooks Harris wrote:
The "rubber-band era" is
just entirely irrelevant. Its historically interesting, and may be
required for some special application concerning that period, but for
practical "UTC-like" timekeeping its just an historical curiosity.
This fact is somewhat more apparent looking at the IERS publication
Leap_Second_History.dat, at
https://hpiers.obspm.fr/eoppc/bul/bulc/Leap_Second_History.dat. There we
see *no values* before "1 1 1972" - the "rubber-band era" is gone.
That's correct - the "rubber band era" no long exists.
Since the name of the document is "leap second history", the rate
offsets and fractional second step adjustments before 1972 aren't
applicable. They can be found elsewhere at the IERS site:
http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/index.php?index=UTC&lang=en
I distribute a Windows astronomical toolbox DLL which includes time
scale conversions. Since astronomy often requires analysis of old data,
the DLL can deal with pre-1972 UTC. I won't get into the dispute over
whether or not that's bona fide UTC! However, the IERS and USNO
recognize it as such, so I assume the user will expect time conversions
to work in that era. (I have never needed that capability myself.)
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