The second is broken

JULY 25, 2022

It’s time to leave the leap second in the past "While the leap second might have been an acceptable solution in 1972, when it made both the scientific community and the telecom industry happy, these days UTC is equally bad for both digital applications and scientists, who often choose TAI or UT1 instead." "At Meta, we’re supporting an industry effort to stop future introductions of leap seconds and . . . we believe it is time to introduce new technologies to replace it." "At best, such a time jump crashed programs or even corrupted data, due to weird timestamps in the data storage." "The impact of a negative leap second has never been tested on a large scale; it could have a devastating effect on the software relying on timers or schedulers." "In any case, every leap second is a major source of pain for people who manage hardware infrastructures."

November 28, 2012

What time scale is used by the jpl horizons system? "I'm confused by the ust of the term "UT" in the description of time scales used by the JPL HORIZONS system." "My understanding is that UTC has leap seconds, so that there should be an extra second at the end of a day on which a leap second was added, but the intervals reported by HORIZONS lacks these, and look more like UT1: 2012-Jun-30 23:59:58.000 2456109.499976852 2012-Jun-30 23:59:58.667 2456109.499984568 2012-Jun-30 23:59:59.333 2456109.499992284 2012-Jul-01 00:00:00.000 2456109.500000000 2012-Jul-01 00:00:00.667 2456109.500007716 2012-Jul-01 00:00:01.333 2456109.500015432 2012-Jul-01 00:00:02.000 2456109.500023148