Tom Van Baak wrote on 2005-01-20 17:33 UTC: > No one can know for sure but I was wondering if > there is a consensus on when the first leap hour > would occur?
A good table summary of some projections is in http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html#dutctable and other discussions are on http://www.ien.it/luc/cesio/itu/ITU.shtml and there in particular in Prediction of Universal Time and LOD Variation - D. Gambis and C. Bizouard, (IERS) http://www.ien.it/luc/cesio/itu/gambis.pdf > Even to an order of magnitude? I > ask because the above document draft says "at > least 500 years" while others here cite numbers > like 600 years, or 5000 years. 5000 years until the next leap second sounds like someone got some very basic maths wrong (by then, a whole leap day would be due), the other two figures sound feasible. Perhaps a confusion about the rotation of earth (UT1 clock frequency) slowing down roughly linearly, therefore the accumulation of the phase difference being (after integrating) an essentially quadratic function? Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__