2008/7/11 Pierre GM <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: >> A final note on time scales >> --------------------------- > Wow, indeed. In environmental sciences (my side) and in finances (Matt's), we > very rarely have a need for that precision, thankfully...
We do, sometimes, in pulsar astronomy. But I think it's reasonable to force us to use our own custom time representations. For example, I've dealt with time series representing (X-ray) photon arrival times, expressed in modified Julian days. The effect of representing microsecond-scale quantities as differences between numbers on the order of fifty thousand days I leave to your imagination. But 64 bits was certainly not enough. More, there are even more subtle effects relating to differences between TAI and TT, issues relating to whether your times are measured at the earth's barycenter or the solar system barycenter... A date/time class that tries to do everything is quickly going to become unfeasibly complicated. Anne _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
