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

[Gerard Ashton]

On 9/21/2011 7:59 AM, Daniel R. Tobias wrote:

> 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.

>

True, but the tables used by officials might have time based on any of 
several time scales.
When the difference between UT1 and civil time becomes non-negligible 
compared to
1 minute, the officials will have to be trained about the distinctions 
among the time scales
and they will have to make sure they are using the right time scale. 
(Or, they will have to
be trained what product from a suitable institution, such as the US 
Naval Observatory,
they should ask for.)