[LEAPSECS] the big artillery

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Michael Deckers via LEAPSECS <leapsecs at leapsecond.com> wrote:
 |   On 2014-11-04 19:45, Brooks Harris wrote on the history of UTC:
 |
 |> For purposes of astronomy, and probably others, the "rubber \
 |> band era" may have
 |> relevance. To call it "UTC" seems a bit of a stretch to me, but there's no
 |> generally accepted name for what Zefram calls "rubber-seconds era of UTC".
 |
 |   An excellent account of the political and technical history of UTC is on
 |   Steve Allen's page [http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsec\
 |   s/timescales.html#UTC].

Oh, the german Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) also
has a general -- at least -- overview of the set of problems.
(English: [1] and all around that; oops, not everything is
translated, what a shame!  I hope it's not due to lack of
resources, which seems to become notorious in Germany [for things
that really matter at least].)

Those ladies and gentlemen also seem to have the ambition to
reduce the "non-realtimity" [2]:

  In the year 2013, 25 time scales UTC(k) with deviations
  UTC-UTC(k) of less than 10 ns existed. For example, the
  difference UTC-UTC(PTB) was 0,8 ns on January 2, 2013.

  [1] <https://www.ptb.de/cms/en/fachabteilungen/abt4/fb-44/ag-441/realisation-of-the-si-second.html>
  Rest under
  <https://www.ptb.de/cms/en/fachabteilungen/abt4/fb-44/ag-441/realisation-of-legal-time-in-germany/>
  [2] ...<coordinated-universal-time-utc.html>
  [3] ...<atomic-time-scales.html>
  [4] ...<the-time-scales-tai-and-eal.html>
  [5] ...<leap-seconds.html>

--steffen