The Solstice
Things are going to get brighter around here. The winter solstice occured this morning at 6:08 UTC, or 1:08 AM here on the east coast.
What is UTC, you ask? The familiar old Greenwich Mean Time has been replaced by the bureaucratically named Coordinated Universal Time or UTC. Apparently the earth wasn't rotating precisely enough. (Not that I had noticed).
UTC is one variation of Universal Time. Others include UT0 (which according to Wikipedia, is "not, strictly speaking, Universal"), UT1 (which varies up to 3 milliseconds a day), UT1R, UT2, UT2R, UTC-SLS (for Smoothed Leap Seconds) and UTS (Smoothed Universal Time).
The spring equinox is March 20 at 5:48 AM UTC, which means 1:48 AM our time. That's 89 days from today.
What is UTC, you ask? The familiar old Greenwich Mean Time has been replaced by the bureaucratically named Coordinated Universal Time or UTC. Apparently the earth wasn't rotating precisely enough. (Not that I had noticed).
UTC is one variation of Universal Time. Others include UT0 (which according to Wikipedia, is "not, strictly speaking, Universal"), UT1 (which varies up to 3 milliseconds a day), UT1R, UT2, UT2R, UTC-SLS (for Smoothed Leap Seconds) and UTS (Smoothed Universal Time).
The spring equinox is March 20 at 5:48 AM UTC, which means 1:48 AM our time. That's 89 days from today.
posted by Tom Noyes at 9:02 AM
2 Comments:
That wikipedia entry made my head hurt.
I'm looking forward to when we move to the Stardate calendar.
Great. We can replace number we don't understand with numbers we don't understand.
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