[LEAPSECS] Legal violation for failure to know sunrise/sunset to nearest minute

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 21 Sep 2011 at 7:53, Ian Batten wrote:


> hunting sunrise, hunting sunset, hunting daylight and hunting

> night all return zero hits. 


I don't really think that the presence or absence of enforced 
penalties for failing to precisely adhere to sunrise/sunset-based 
restrictions makes any particular argument either for or against any 
proposal of what to do with leap seconds.  The times of sunrise and 
sunset, after all, are not a constant in any time scale now in use or 
seriously proposed; they vary by latitude, longitude, time of year, 
variance from year to year due to the leap-year cycle, and are 
affected by any change in length of day, length of year, and tilt of 
Earth axis.  Astronomers have to do whatever complex calculations 
they need to do in order to figure them out to the desired accuracy, 
and any vagaries of the civil time system such as the presence or 
absence of leap seconds (along with time zones and daylight saving 
time) are just some more things needing to be taken into account.  
Everybody else just reads the results in an almanac.

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