Having read two recent books on the tumultuous history of Daylight Saving
Time ("Seize the Daylight" and "Spring Forward"), I think that a one-hour
difference between zone time and sun time may be too large, even if it will
not occur in my lifetime. Of course, it may be considered to be plus
Dear Frank,
I well understand your arguments, but there are also very strong
arguments against leap seconds. So, one has to decide which
applications are more important: the many technical applications
which would go better without leap seconds, or applications like
sundials or traditional naviga
Dear Wolfgang,
You ask:
> Who cares about UTC in every-day life?
Well all diallists and anyone who uses astronomical tables
care about UTC precisely because it is, currently, guaranteed
the same as UT1 to within 0.9s and we can ignore that difference.
When UTC-UT1 is even a few seconds, never
The last sentence in point 2 of my previous message should have be:
"To keep the time which is displayed by our watches
more or less connected to earth rotation, one can easily adopt
the zone time."
What I mean is the following: Today, Central European Time (CET) is
UTC + 1 h. When UTC differs fr
> > Keep the leap second, no leap hour.
The systems of time are rather complicated, and one cannot discuss it
with simple arguments without knowing all details. As a staff member
of the Central Bureau of the International Earth Rotation and Reference
Systems Service and member of the IAU working
