A month ago was the longest lunar eclipse this century, and it was well visible from Mozambique. I know folks there who forwarded a couple of low resolution versions of information pages that the national meteorological agency issued. Upon looking at them I realized that they were saying that someone at the national meteorological agency believed that each town in Mozambique, including the capitol city Maputo, is running on Local Mean Time. I have attached the images. They are the official announcement from INAM. In a lunar eclipse all points on earth see the same fuzzy shadow events within milliseconds, but all times in the table are offset according to the longitude of the city. I know that cell phones in Mozambique use what tzdb says. I cannot say what outlying villages and people without cell phones use, other than that there is no such thing as precise timing of civil events and transportation departures/arrivals as in most modern cultures. So I cannot say for sure whether this is a mistake, an official doing these calculations the way things used to work, or whether outlying towns still set their clocks using a stick in the ground. I have no contacts to dive deeper into Mozambican government, so I wonder if anyone else can find out more. -- Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m
