Top Document: [sci.astro] Time (Astronomy Frequently Asked Questions) (3/9) Previous Document: C.01 When is 02/01/04? or is there a standard way of writing dates? Next Document: C.03 How do I compute astronomical phenomena for my location? See reader questions & answers on this topic! - Help others by sharing your knowledge Markus Kuhn <Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk>, Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com> In the beginning there were only solar days: sunset was considered to be the end of the day and the beginning of the next day. The Jewish and Moslem calendars, which nowadays are used only for religious purposes, still start a new date at sunset instead of midnight. Later, the solar days were divided into hours: 12 hours for the day and 12 hours for the night. The different lengths of day/night were ignored, therefore the daylight hours were longer in summer than in winter. APPARENT (or TRUE) SOLAR TIME: Still later, the hours were made equally long: the day+night was 24 hours. The "day" now started at midnight, not at sunset, which was marked as 00:00 (or 12:00 midnight in English time format). Noon was at 12:00 (or 12:00 noon in English time format). This is what we now refer to as "true solar time"---it is the time shown by a properly setup sundial. This time is local, it is different for different longitudes. (In strict English construction, 12:00 cannot be given either an A.M. = ante meridiem or P.M. = post meridiem designation, but it has become common to use 12 A.M. to mean midnight and 12 P.M. to mean noon. In traditional English, 12 M. = meridies means _noon_; nowadays one is just as likely to see 12 M. = midnight and 12 N. = noon.) (In general, the old English A.M./P.M. notation is extremely problematic. A shorter and more obvious time notation is the modern 24h notation in which the hours in the day range from 00:00 to 23:59. This notation even allows one to distinguish midnight at the start of the day [00:00] from midnight at the end of the day [24:00], while the old English notation requires kludges like starting a contract at 12:01 A.M. in order to make clear which of the two midnights associated with a date had been intended. The 24h notation is the official international standard time notation (ISO 8601) and displayed by almost all digital clocks outside the U.S.A. The 24h notation is also recommended by the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, which defines official time in the U.S.) MEAN SOLAR TIME: True Solar Time isn't a uniform time. The time difference between one noon and the next noon varies through the year, due to two causes: 1. The earth's orbit is elliptical, not perfectly circular, and the Earth's speed in its orbit is greater when closer to the sun. This makes the solar days shorter in July and longer in January. 2. The Earth's axis of rotation does not point in the same direction as the axis of the Earth's orbit round the Sun. (The angle between these two is called the "obliquity of the ecliptic" and is about 23.45 degrees.) This makes the solar days shorter in March and September and longer in June and December. To account for these effects, a fictitious sun, "The Mean Sun," was invented: it moves with uniform velocity in the plane of the Earth's equator, with the same average speed as the true Sun. This Mean Sun defines Mean Solar Time: When the Mean Sun is due south (for northern hemisphere observers), it is noon Mean Solar Time. Now the time difference between two consecutive local noons is always the same (ignoring small irregularities in the Earth's rotation---more about that later). SIDEREAL TIME: Closely connected with the Mean Solar Time is the Sidereal Time, which is defined as the RA (Right Ascension) of the Local Meridian: when the Vernal Point passes the meridian it is 00:00 Sidereal Time. When Orion is at its maximum altitude, it is between 5h and 6h Sidereal Time; when the Big Dipper can be seen close to the zenith it is about 12h Sidereal Time; and when Sagittarius, with all its glories close to the center of our Galaxy, reaches maximum altitude it is around 18h Sidereal Time. The Sidereal Time at a particular place and location is the same as the local Mean Solar Time, plus 12 hours, plus the Right Ascension of the Mean Sun (which is the same as the Mean Longitude of the true sun). It can be computed from this formula: LST(hours) = 6.6974 + 2400.051336 * T + 24 * FRAC(JD+0.5) + long/15 where: LST = Local Sidereal Time in hours JD = the Julian Day Number for the moment, including fractions of a day Note that a new Julian Day starts at Greenwich Noon T = ( JD - 2451545.0 ) / 36525.0 long = your local longitude: east positive, west negative FRAC = a function discarding the integral part and returning only the fractional part of a real number. STANDARD TIME ZONES: Some 100+ years ago the railway made fast transportation possible for the first time. Quite soon it became awkward for the travellers to continually have to adjust their clocks when travelling between different places, and the railway companies had the problem to select which city's time to use for their own schedules. An interim solution was to use a specific "railway time," but soon standard time zones were created. At first the time to be used within a country was the local time of the capital of the country. A few very large countries employed several time zones. It took a few decades to arrive at a worldwide agreement here, and in particular there was a "battle" between England and France whether the world's prime meridian was to be the meridian of the Greenwich or the Paris observatory. England won this battle, and "Greenwich Mean Time" (GMT) was universally agreed upon as the world's standard time zones. Almost all other parts of the world were assigned time zones, which usually differ from GMT by an integral number of hours. Some countries (e.g., India) use differences that are not an integral number of hours. GMT (Greenwich Mean Time): This term is a historic term which is in a strict sense obsolete, though often used (although not in astronomy, e.g., BBC still uses this abbreviation for patriotic reasons ;-) as a synonym for UTC. In 1972, an international atomic time scale has been introduced and since then, the time on the zero meridian, which goes through the old observatory in Greenwich, London, UK, has been called Universal Time (UT). Prior to 1925, it was reckoned for astronomical purposes from Greenwich mean noon (12h UT). Sometimes GMT is referred to as Z ("Zulu"). (This arises from the military custom of writing times as hours and minutes run together and suffixed with a single letter designating the time zone: 2100Z = 21:00 UTC. The word "zulu" is the phonetic word associated with the letter "z.") UT (Universal time): Defined by the Earth's rotation and determined by astronomical observations. This time scale is slightly irregular. There are several different definitions of UT, but the difference between them is always less than about 0.03 s. Usually one means UT2 when saying UT. UT2 is UT corrected for pole wandering and seasonal variations in the Earth's rotational speed. If you are interested in time more precisely than 1 s, then you'll have to differentiate between the following versions of Universal Time: UT0 is the precise solar local time on the zero meridian. It is today measured by radio telescopes which observe quasars. UT1 is UT0 corrected by a periodic effect known as Chandler wobble or "polar wandering", i.e., small changes in the longitude/latitude of all places on the Earth due to the fact that the geographical poles of the Earth "wander" in semi-regular patterns: the poles follow (very approximately) small circles, about 10--20 meters in diameter, with a period of approximately 400--500 days. The changes in the longitude/latitude of all places of Earth due to this amounts to fractions of an arc second (1 arc second = 1/3600 degree). UT2 is an even better corrected version of UT0 which accounts for seasonal variations in the Earth's rotation rate and is sometimes used in astronomy. UTC is a time defined not by the movement of the earth, but by a large collection of atomic clocks located all over the world, the atomic time scale TAI. When UTC and UT1 are about to drift apart more than 0.9 s, a leap second will be inserted (or deleted, but this never has happened) into UTC to correct this. When necessary, leap seconds are inserted as the 61th second of the last UTC minute of June or December. During a leap second, a UTC clock (e.g., a radio clock such as MSF, HBG, or DCF77) shows: 1995-12-31 23:59:59 1995-12-31 23:59:60 1996-01-01 00:00:00 Today, practically all national civil times are defined relative to UTC and differ from UTC by an integral number of hours (sometimes also half- or quarter-hours). UTC is defined in ITU-R Recommendation TF.460-4 and was introduced in 1972. If you are interested in UTC more precisely than a microsecond, then you also have to consider the following differences: The abbreviation UTC can be followed by an abbreviation of the organization who publishes this time reference signal. For example, UTC(USNO) is the US reference time published by the US Naval Observatory, UTC(PTB) is the official German reference time signal published (via a 77.5 kHz long-wave broadcast) by the Physikalisch Technische Bundesanstalt in Braunschweig and UTC(BIPM) is the most official time published by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures in Paris, however UTC(BIPM) is only a filtered paper clock published each year that is used by the other time maintainers to resynchronize their clocks against each other. All these UTC versions do not differ by more than a few nanoseconds. The acronym UTC stands for Coordinated Universal Time. In 1970 when this system was being developed by the International Telecommunication Union, it felt it was best to designate a single abbreviation for use in all languages in order to minimize confusion. Unanimous agreement could not be achieved on using either the English word order, CUT, or the French word order, TUC, so a compromise using neither, UTC, was adopted. DUT1 is the difference between UTC and UT1 as published by the US Naval Observatory rounded to 0.1 s each week. This results in the UT1 which is used e.g., for space navigation. ET (Ephemeris Time): Somewhere around 1930--1940, astronomers noticed that errors in celestial positions of planets could be explained by assuming that they were due to slow variations on the Earth's rotation. Starting in 1960, the time scale Ephemeris Time (ET) was introduced for astronomical purposes. ET closely matches UT in the 19th century, but in the 20th century ET and UT have been diverging more and more. Currently ET is running almost precisely one minute ahead of UT. In 1984, ET was replaced by Dynamical Time and TT. For most purposes, ET up to 1983-12-31 and TDT from 1984-01-01 can be regarded as a continuous time-scale. TT and Dynamical Time: Introduced in 1984 as a replacement for ET, it defines a uniform astronomical time scale more accurately, taking relativistic effects into account. There are two kinds of Dynamical Time: TDT (Terrestrial Dynamical Time), which is a time scale tied to the Earth, and TDB (Barycentric Dynamical Time), used as a time reference for the barycenter of the solar system. The difference between TDT and TDB is always smaller than a few milliseconds. When the difference TDT-TDB is not important, TDT is referred to as TT. For most purposes, TDT can be considered equal to TAI + 32.184 seconds. TAI (Temps Atomique International = International Atomic Time): Defined by the same worldwide network of atomic clocks that defines UTC. In contrast to UTC, TAI has no leap seconds. TAI and UTC were identical in the late 1950s. The difference between TAI and UTC is always an integral number of seconds. TAI is the most uniform time scale we currently have available. RELATION BETWEEN THE TIME SCALES -------------------------------- TDT = TAI+32.184s ==> UT-UTC = TAI-UTC - (TDT-UT) + 32.184s Starting at TAI-UTC ET/TDT-UT UT-UTC 1972-01-01 +10.00 +42.23 -0.05 1972-07-01 +11.00 +42.80 +0.38 1973-01-01 +12.00 +43.37 +0.81 1973-07-01 -"- +43.93 +0.25 1974-01-01 +13.00 +44.49 +0.69 1974-07-01 -"- +44.99 +0.19 1975-01-01 +14.00 +45.48 +0.70 1975-07-01 -"- +45.97 +0.21 1976-01-01 +15.00 +46.46 +0.72 1976-07-01 -"- +46.99 +0.19 1977-01-01 +16.00 +47.52 +0.66 1977-07-01 -"- +48.03 +0.15 1978-01-01 +17.00 +48.53 +0.65 1978-07-01 -"- +49.06 +0.12 1979-01-01 +18.00 +49.59 +0.59 1979-07-01 -"- +50.07 +0.11 1980-01-01 +19.00 +50.54 +0.64 1980-07-01 -"- +50.96 +0.22 1981-01-01 -"- +51.38 -0.20 1981-07-01 +20.00 +51.78 +0.40 1982-01-01 -"- +52.17 +0.01 1982-07-01 +21.00 +52.57 +0.61 1983-01-01 -"- +52.96 +0.22 1983-07-01 +22.00 +53.38 +0.80 1984-01-01 -"- +53.79 +0.39 1984-07-01 -"- +54.07 +0.11 1985-01-01 -"- +54.34 -0.16 1985-07-01 +23.00 +54.61 +0.57 1986-01-01 -"- +54.87 +0.31 1986-07-01 -"- +55.10 +0.08 1987-01-01 -"- +55.32 -0.14 1987-07-01 -"- +55.57 -0.39 1988-01-01 +24.00 +55.82 +0.36 1988-07-01 -"- +56.06 +0.12 1989-01-01 -"- +56.30 -0.12 1989-07-01 -"- +56.58 -0.40 1990-01-01 +25.00 +56.86 +0.32 1990-07-01 -"- +57.22 -0.04 1991-01-01 +26.00 +57.57 +0.61 1991-07-01 -"- +57.94 +0.24 1992-01-01 -"- +58.31 -0.13 1992-07-01 +27.00 +58.72 +0.46 1993-01-01 -"- +59.12 +0.06 1993-07-01 +28.00 +59.5 +0.7 1994-01-01 -"- +59.9 +0.3 1994-07-01 +29.00 +60.3 +0.9 1995-01-01 -"- +60.7 +0.5 1995-07-01 -"- +61.1 +0.1 1996-01-01 +30.00 +61.63 +0.55 1996-07-01 -"- +62.0 +0.2 1997-01-01 -"- +62.4 -0.2 1997-07-01 +31.00 +62.8 +0.4 1998-01-01 -"- +63.3 -0.1 1998-07-01 -"- +63.7 -0.5 1999-01-01 +32.00 +64.1 +0.1 Additional information about the world time standard UTC (e.g., when will the next leap second be inserted in time) is available from the US Naval Observatory and the International Earth Rotation Service (IERS): <URL:http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/time.html> <URL:http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/gps_datafiles.html> <URL:http://maia.usno.navy.mil/> <URL:ftp://maia.usno.navy.mil/ser7/tai-utc.dat> <URL:ftp://tycho.usno.navy.mil/pub/series/ser14.txt> <URL:ftp://maia.usno.navy.mil/ser7/deltat.preds> <URL:ftp://mesiom.obspm.fr/iers/>. <URL:ftp://hpiers.obspm.fr/iers/bul/bulc/BULLETINC.GUIDE> Also <URL:http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~ntp/> is a good start if you want to learn more about time standards. User Contributions:Top Document: [sci.astro] Time (Astronomy Frequently Asked Questions) (3/9) Previous Document: C.01 When is 02/01/04? or is there a standard way of writing dates? Next Document: C.03 How do I compute astronomical phenomena for my location? Part0 - Part1 - Part2 - Part3 - Part4 - Part5 - Part6 - Part7 - Part8 - Single Page [ Usenet FAQs | Web FAQs | Documents | RFC Index ] Send corrections/additions to the FAQ Maintainer: jlazio@patriot.net
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