FITS standard

Peter Bunclark psb at ast.cam.ac.uk
Tue Apr 21 06:02:28 EDT 1998


I would have thought that terran space-travellers who prefer to stay
synched to earth time,
perhaps because it suits their circadian rthyms, could stick with UTC,
probably running
ntp like the rest of us; or at lease, EXO-NTP when it comes out.  These
people can then quite
easily write their FITS tapes (have you ever tried loading a
6250-streamer in zero-G? Me neither)
using UTC.
	On the other hand, the Martian settlers may prefer to divide one Sol
into 24 hours etc etc.
Now these folk would naturally use MTC (Marsiversal Coordinated Time; 
the achronym is dyslexic
in honour of another terran language that used to be tbe lingua
franca...).  However, their
equipment is always dusty so archiving the data is about as far down the
pipeline as it goes.
	The Jovians don't matter because they're still waiting for their first
clear night, and
the Europeans just splash about under the ice all day. And night.

	And back in the real world, Voyager data can be clocked to
high-accuracy in UTC, so
what's the problem?

Peter.

Steve Allen wrote:
> >see there might be simultaneity issues for interstellar probes...)
>




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