[LEAPSECS] Meeting with Wayne Whyte

[Steve Allen]

Greetings Dave Finkleman,

On Mon 2011-01-31T11:59:21 -0500, Finkleman, Dave hath writ:

> I have convinced Wayne that a face to face meeting would clear the air.

> I meet with him on Friday.  I would appreciate a few examples of

> specific commercial or system unique software that would be deprecated

> if leap seconds and their more precise companions were deleted.


I point out that the next ITAC-R meeting is Feb 3 so more policy may
have been decided before Friday.  I also send along this snip from his
report as USSG7 chair which he just sent out in preparation for
Thursday's meeting.

    The Chairman of SG-7 agreed to forward the revised ITU-R
    Recommendation TF.460 (elimination of leap second adjustments to
    UTC) to the Radiocommunication Assembly for consideration and
    approval.  The Chairman, recognizing that SG-7 would not be
    meeting again prior to the Radiocommunication Assembly and that
    the areas of disagreement were philosophical in nature and not
    technical, proposed to send the DRR to the RA along with a
    detailed report describing the differing views.

This adds more details to the information from Arias and Ohishi about
the 2010 October SG7 meeting that I yesterday found in the web page of
IAU Comm 31 activities.  (And for today the SG7 delegation from Canada
is my hero.)

As a first answer to your question, we have a telescope with a
closed-source control system which will not permit |DUT1| > 1.0 s.  If
leap seconds are removed from the time scale reported by the firmware
in the GPS unit which provides input for telescope pointing then the
only means we will have to keep the telescope pointed at the sky will
be to systematically shift the value of the longitude of the telescope
in its configuration file.  Our use of the telescope is entirely
celestial, so we can afford to lie about the terrestrial position.

We are not the only customers of this system.  We understand that some
of these telescopes have been sold to DoD and other customers whose
usage of the telescope pointing system is for satellite tracking.  I
doubt that their application can so easily tolerate a lie about the
longitude of their telescopes.

--
Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
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