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........extra second just before midnight on New Years Eve?
============================================= http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=18607 On December 31, 2005 a "leap second" will be added to the world's clocks at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This corresponds to 6:59:59 pm Eastern Standard Time, when the extra second will be inserted at the U.S. Naval Observatory. This marks the 23rd leap second to be added to UTC, a uniform time-scale kept by atomic clocks around the world. Although you normally don't think about it, for most conventional uses the "civil" time you use is based on UTC. At the U.S. Naval Observatory, UTC is determined by averaging the time signals from cesium beam atomic clocks and hydrogen masers (the last being an improvement over the tried and true cesium clocks for measuring short periods of time). Man's oldest clock has always been the Earth. We know it's morning when the Sun rises, noon when the Sun is overhead, and evening when the Sun sets. The Earth's accuracy as a clock is good to about one thousandth of a second per day - more than enough accuracy for most people. However, the invention of "atomic" clocks, which operate by measuring the resonant frequency of a given atom - (currently Cesium, Hydrogen or Mercury) - greatly increased that accuracy, and has now led to the capability at the U.S. Naval Observatory of measuring time to accuracies exceeding a billionth of a second per day. ========================================== I guess my wife gets an extra second of a kiss from me. ;-) |