On Fri 2005-08-05T19:58:57 +0200, Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ:
> How about giving 50 years advance notice of leapseconds ?
I've mentioned this before, but it's time to get explicit.
McCarthy suggested pretty much this at the March 2001 meeting of CGSIC.
http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/cgsic/meetings/summaryrpts/37thmeeting/McCarthy.ppt
See Slide 18 which is titled Conventional adjustment of UTC.
Yes, if you are willing tolerate excursions between UTC and UT1 of
about a minute, it is possible to produce a conventional expression
for the schedule of leap seconds. A colleage here suggests that a new
conventional expression could be produced every decade, where each new
expression was guaranteed to be identical to the previous one for the
first 40 years.
This level of agreement is more than enough to keep all but the most
amazing sundials displaying the correct civil time. And all
expressions for mean solar time have always been conventional.
Newcomb's expression from 1895 was merely the first one approved by an
international body (in 1896) for use everywhere starting in 1901.
Seeing that even P-H K's needs would be satisfied by this I am left
still wondering why this elegant compromise was discarded. Was it
discarded by the atomic clock keepers, or by the astronomers?
Today's discussion is the sort that I hoped Dr. Matsakis was desiring
when the LEAPSECS list was set up. I think we begin to see the
practical requirements gained from actual experience. All such
discussion had pretty much vanished after the Torino colloquium.
--
Steve Allen <sla_at_ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS)
UCO/Lick Observatory Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99858
University of California Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06014
Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m
Received on Fri Aug 05 2005 - 12:36:36 PDT