On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 12:33:48AM -0800, Steve Allen wrote:
What for? Why should we (the people of the Earth) care about mean
solar days? For some purposes, apparent solar time is important, but
most of the time it's civil time that counts. Why should that be tied
to mean solar days?
On Tue 2003-01-28T16:31:03 -0700, Rob Seaman hath writ:
oscillatory modes.) Just one more example (among many) is my long
time participation in the FITS standards process. FITS is astronomy's
universal data format, whose metadata standards rely explicitly on
UTC.
For the sake of further
Can I muddy the waters with some facts/evidence I have collected recently?
(if your answer is no - then hit 'delete' now ;-)
First where do I fit in this debate. I am the systems manager for the
Astronomy group at St.Andrews University. We run a small observatory with
4 telescopes, a couple of
Steve Allen scripsit:
Which is more important...
for civil time to be counted in SI seconds?
for civil time to track the rotation of earth smoothly?
IMHO the former.
Mark's alternative resembles the civil time solution adopted by the
martian colonists in Kim Stanley
John Cowan wrote on 2003-01-29 17:56 UTC:
The problem is that they are not announced much in advance, and one needs
to keep a list of them back to 1972 which grows quadratically in size.
Is this a real problem?
Who really needs to maintain a full list of leap seconds and for what
application
William Thompson scripsit:
Any application which seeks to calculate the difference in time between
two events recorded in UTC time needs to know if there are any leap
seconds between the start and stop time. For example, suppose you
were studying solar flares, and analyzing some data taken
Those of us with a day job may be having a hard time keeping up with
the messages as they arrive fast and furious :-)
# The need for leap seconds is not caused by the secular slowdown
# of Earth's rotation (which is less than 2 milliseconds per century)
# but by irregular variations in this
On Wed 2003-01-29T15:43:24 -0700, Rob Seaman hath writ:
Please! Let's talk about ways to improve UTC and civil timekeeping.
And let's take the appropriate amount of time to reach a decision -
say - 40 or 50 years. In the mean time, let's pay attention to the
real question, which is how to
On Wed 2003/01/29 15:43:24 PDT, Rob Seaman wrote
in a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Basically we don't have leap seconds because the Earth's rotation is
slowing down (by transfering angular momentum to the Moon). Rather,
we have leap seconds because the Earth has *already* slowed down since