Okay all you smarties–
We all know why we have Leap Year–
—because it takes the Earth 365¼ days to circle the Sun! So we add a day every 4 years to keep the calendar “lined up.”
. . . . .
**Happy Birthday to my FavCuz who missed it by, like, an inch.
. . . . .
But did you ever hear of the “Leap SECOND?”
What–?
—In June, a second is added to the clock to keep the Atomic Clock accurate.
Again, what–?
So I looked it up online because I heard about this a couple of times today—
from the U.S. Naval Observatory and Earth Orientation Department
Civil time is occasionally adjusted by one-second increments to ensure that the difference between a uniform time scale defined by atomic clocks (TAI) does not differ from the Earth’s rotational time by more than 0.9 seconds. Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), an atomic time, is this adjusted time scale and it forms the basis for our civil time.
In 1956, following several years of work, two astronomers at the U. S. Naval Observatory (USNO) and two astronomers at the National Physical Laboratory (Teddington, England) determined the relationship between the frequency of the Cesium atom (the standard of time) and the rotation of the Earth at a particular epoch. As a result, they defined the second of atomic time as the length of time required for 9 192 631 770 cycles of the Cesium atom at zero magnetic field. The second thus defined was equivalent to the second defined by the fraction 1 / 31 556 925.9747 of the year 1900. The atomic second was set equal, then, to an average second of Earth rotation time near the end of the 19th century.
—Zzzz-zzZ-zzZz-z-z-z-ZZ-Z-z
Seriously. Huh?
Then I “read” The Leap Second Explained. . . .
And how they’re DECLARED and how they’re INSERTED. . . .
And then the BBC explaned it (uh, okay—)
Did I miss school that day?
Uh~I can build things, and make things look pretty–!
