[LEAPSECS] Nope, still not broken

[Rob Seaman]

On Jan 3, 2017, at 9:51 AM, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

> On a purely schadenfreude note: I find it extremely ironic that there are any telescopes that have issues with a leap second since they are the primary beneficiary of this peculiar dance we do upon occasion.


The point of leap seconds is to make small enough adjustments to be negligible. You may dispute whether they succeed entirely, but that is the design goal.

As someone may have said, leap seconds are a means to an end. The point is to maintain UTC as an expression of Universal Time. UT appears in numerous expressions, and if 0.9s (more like 0.6s, in practice) is an acceptable tolerance, then no overt handling of leap seconds is required. It is precisely the utility of UTC as an expression of mean solar time that is threatened.

Schadenfreude is inappropriate.

Rob
—
Ironie ist klares Bewußtsein der ewigen Agilität, des unendlich vollen Chaos – Friedrich Schlegel

Keep your Bewußtsein klares.