4 ms·
> Keeping UTC within a second of UT1 has important real-world uses, including navigation and astronomy. Really? I thought for both of those, you'd want to add
by perlgeek 10y ago
> Keeping UTC within a second of UT1 has important real-world uses, including navigation and astronomy.
Really? I thought for both of those, you'd want to add some corrections anyway, like for astronomy, your longitude, because usually you aren't in the middle of your time zone anyway.
And if you need to add corrections anyway, why not quit adding leap seconds and handle them in those corrections?
- LeoPanthera 10y agoYou are not wrong, but in the real world, getting hold of an accurate representation of UT1 is very difficult, but knowing accurately UTC is very easy, and so in practice this is what is used for everyday civil purposes.
- vilhelm_s 10y agoIt it really so difficult? The difference between UTC and UT1 is broadcast by the different radio services, and you can also get it online (ftp://hpiers.obspm.fr/iers/bul/buld/bulletind.dat). Also, apparently NIST makes UT1 available over NTP so you can just point your computer to it (https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-services/ut1-ntp-time-dissemination https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/time-se...).