Our newest telescope comes from a vendor which relies on Microsoft for the control systems. Its intended application demands precise timing of the exposure sequence in order to compute the barycentric velocity of the telescope. While investigating the performance of the system clock I ran into the following:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939322 In short, Windows XP comes with an implementation of NTP which "cannot reliably maintain sync time to the range of 1 to 2 seconds. Such tolerances are outside the design specification of the W32Time service." Obviously if they can't keep the system clock accurate to within 1 second, then they don't have to deal with leap seconds, and the point that I make with my epoch time page http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/epochtime.html is utterly moot. If I'm not mistaken that was the same presumption made by the folks who instituted leap seconds in the first place. -- Steve Allen <s...@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 University of California Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
