NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2012 Jun 30, 10:13 -0700
A leap second will be inserted into the calendar today just before midnight UT. That's 8pm Eastern Daylight Time. A properly programmed clock this evening in the eastern US should read the following sequence of times:
7:59:58
7:59:59
7:59:60
8:00:00
8:00:01
Leap seconds have been added on December 31 three times in the past fifteen years. This is the first leap second added in June since 1997 and given the pace of technological change in that period, it will be an interesting test case for the theory that some computer systems cannot handle leap seconds properly.
So here's a navigational question for you to ponder: how much should the GHA of objects listed in the Nautical Almanac be adjusted after midnight UT tonight? Is your Nautical Almanac now "wrong"? Or is it always "right"?
-FER
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