Re: [LEAPSECS] extracting leap second schedule

From: Rob Seaman <seaman_at_noao.edu>
Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 16:11:54 -0700

On May 24, 2006, at 6:27 AM, Zefram wrote:

> I've written a Perl module that handles the conversion between TAI and
> UTC. It's Time::UTC, available at <http://search.cpan.org/~zefram/>.
> When asked about future times where it doesn't yet know the
> leap second schedule, it automatically downloads and parses
> <http://maia.usno.navy.mil/ser7/tai-utc.dat>. This works well if
> there's
> a future leap second already scheduled, but otherwise there is a
> problem
> in working out how far ahead the last TAI-UTC offset applies.

Note that in a leap-secondless alternate reality, exactly the same
issues
would be encountered when trying to predict UT1 given TAI (or its
evil kirk
twin, "new-UTC").

> Amusingly, in the long run this will become a non-problem on its own.
> In perhaps a century or so it will become unavoidable to schedule
> more than one leap second ahead. That way the final time mentioned in
> tai-utc.dat will always be in the future.

Non-amusingly, in the alternate no-time-of-day universe, this never
becomes a non-issue for recovering the orientation of Earth-2.

Rob Seaman
National Optical Astronomy Observatory
Received on Tue May 30 2006 - 16:12:20 PDT

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