[LEAPSECS] Leap smear

[Ian Batten]

On 19 Sep 2011, at 2350, Rob Seaman wrote:

> IThat requirement (description of the problem space) is that civil time-of-day is mean solar time.


So astronomers say.  No-one else cares, and if they should, astronomers are making an incredibly bad job of explaining why.


> 

> Some of those implications are a large expense to astronomers.


To which many would say, "so what?"  As one trusts the astronomy community has learnt from the JWST debacle, there comes a point when you can no longer successfully claim that astronomy's needs are paramount.   If astronomers have got equipment that assume the relationship between UT1 and UTC is "close enough" and can't be fixed then that's a shame, but I doubt that anyone's going to go into bat apart from astronomers themselves.   


>  Others are that at some point in time an action will be needed by some civil authority to accommodate the resulting divergence


The argument that "this convenient change which makes life easier now might involve changing the timezones in a thousand years' time" doesn't really work, you know.   Put aside the astronomy community.  Timezones are routinely changed, for political reasons.  Civil time changes by an hour every six months.  The idea that timezones will have to change by an hour in a thousand years' time isn't going to frighten anyone.   

ian