"Olson, Arthur David (NCI)" wrote on 1999-07-22 13:43 UTC:
From: Michael Deckers [SMTP:Michael.Deckers@mch6.siemens.de] Sent: Thursday, July 22, 1999 6:29 AM To: tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov Subject: correction for tzdata/leapseconds
Just a quibble in the file "@(#)leapseconds 7.11" in ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata1999d.tar.gz:
# The International Earth Rotation Service periodically uses leap seconds # to keep UTC to within 0.9 s of TAI (atomic time); see ***************** This becomes correct only with UT1 in place of TAI.
I agree. The string "TAI (atomic time)" should definitely be replaced by something like "UT1 (astronomical earth time, corrected for known periodic fluctuations)". See also http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/ITU-R-TF.460-4.pdf http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/astronomical-time.pdf for the official definition of UTC, but please don't include these URLs (only temporarily available). Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>