Re: decision tree for civil time

[Rob Seaman]

On Aug 14, 2005, at 4:11 AM, Ed Davies wrote: Could come under "other" perhaps but millisecond steps are worth listing explicitly.  At least, that's how I assume the epsilon scheme would be implemented. These options are meant to describe civil time, not timekeeping in general.  To permit fixed size millisecond leaps would require the flexibility to schedule a leap throughout the course of a day.  Just divide the typical annual or 18 month leap second latency by a thousand.  Many days would have three or more milliseconds to accommodate.  I was assuming (which is where we all have gotten into trouble, no matter what scheme we're favoring), that the daily epsilon would either be issued as a arbitrary (albeit currently small) height leap at UT midnight or other daily schedule - or more likely, that this would be handled like ntp-style time slices.  In fact, just input the epsilon as a non-zero clock rate to be ironed out using the current algorithms.  Over the centuries, of course, the daily millisecond loads would accelerate - unless Calabretta had some more subtle idea in mind. That said, we're just trying to list the options now, so I'll add a millisecond option. Rob Seaman National Optical Astronomy Observatory