Leap second checking

As you may have heard, the economic slowdown of 2008 has caused the
earth to slow its course around the sun and they had to add an extra
second to 2008 before allowing 2009 to start.

While Microsoft's zune crashed at the tought of a leap year, there have
been a few reports of some unix systems crashing because of the leap second.

My VMS and os-X systems did not complain.

However, how can I check if those systems actually processed the leap
second and are in sync with the real time of 2009 ?

-------------------


INTERNATIONAL EARTH ROTATION AND REFERENCE SYSTEMS SERVICE (IERS)

SERVICE INTERNATIONAL DE LA ROTATION TERRESTRE ET DES SYSTEMES DE REFERENCE

SERVICE DE LA ROTATION TERRESTRE
OBSERVATOIRE DE PARIS
61, Av. de l'Observatoire 75014 PARIS (France)
Tel. : 33 (0) 1 40 51 22 26
FAX : 33 (0) 1 40 51 22 91
e-mail : services.iers@xxxxxxxx
http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc

Paris, 4 July 2008

Bulletin C 36

To authorities responsible
for the measurement and
distribution of time


UTC TIME STEP
on the 1st of January 2009


A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2008.
The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be:

2008 December 31, 23h 59m 59s
2008 December 31, 23h 59m 60s
2009 January 1, 0h 0m 0s

The difference between UTC and the International Atomic Time TAI is:

from 2006 January 1, 0h UTC, to 2009 January 1 0h UTC : UTC-TAI = - 33s
from 2009 January 1, 0h UTC, until further notice : UTC-TAI = - 34s

Leap seconds can be introduced in UTC at the end of the months of December
or June, depending on the evolution of UT1-TAI. Bulletin C is mailed every
six months, either to announce a time step in UTC or to confirm that there
will be no time step at the next possible date.



Daniel GAMBIS
Head
Earth Orientation Center of IERS
Observatoire de Paris, France
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Julian Date and Leap Seconds
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  • Re: Truly Offensive Bad Astronomy
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  • Re: FreeBSD handles leapsecond correctly
    ... > No POSIX compliant system can tell the difference, ... >>1,000 seconds before the insertion or deletion of the leap second. ... > Computers should use UTC because UTC underlies civil timekeeping. ...
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  • Re: Leap Second display
    ... > synchronized to UTC. ... GPS is NOT adjusted for leap seconds. ... the last time there was a leap second different units ...
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  • Re: Leap second functional question
    ... minute, hour, day, week are of variable duration, depending ... utc retains no memory of leap seconds. ... UTC simply erases that leap second from memory. ...
    (comp.protocols.time.ntp)
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