In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Rob Seaman writes: >The method you suggest would work, but I believe mean and apparent >solar time historically were derived from nighttime sidereal >observations.
In Denmark the last "holder" of the job was the "Carlsberg Meridian Telescope" which has subsequently been moved to La Palma: http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~dwe/SRF/camc.html http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~dwe/papers/2001AN....322..347E.pdf It was one of the first telescopes to be equipped with a computer so it could carry out an observation schedule autonomously. (I have been told, but am not quite sure I belive, that this was where it was first documented that the thermal disturbances caused by humans in the dome degraded observation performance.) >I suspect even folks >on the extreme opposite sides of the leap second question would today >prefer a single world wide civil time standard. Yes, anything else would just be asking for trouble. The problem is that today we have two: Correct implementations of UTC Botched implementations of UTC The USA proposal is not about scientific correctness as much as about the economic implications of living with or fixing the second category, compared to redefining UTC so the two become identical. As I understood the situation last week, nobody in the gang here had problems with leap seconds if we got a longer warning (40-50 years). So what prevents us from writing up our own proposal to ITU ? I'm pretty sure that we could get a rather impressive list of signatures from both camps if we did a bit of lobby work in our respective communities. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.