[fitsbits] Leap Second questionnaire

[Arnold Rots]

Rob,

Thank you for the reminder.  From what I understand it is indeed the
navigation community that drives this initiative; note the last words
of IAU Resolution 2000-B2: "and relevant navigational agencies".
Also, remember that there is this unnecessary time-scale, GPS, that
leaves the strong impression that the GPS folks had not realized the
existence of the leap second mechanism - if they had, they would (?)
have adopted TAI.  Which leads me to the point I wanted to make:
anybody who wants to use a leap-second-free time scale can make use of
the existing one: TAI (or TT for astronomy).  Doing away with the UTC
leap seconds turns UTC into an unnecessary duplicate of TAI.

  - Arnold

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Arnold H. Rots                                Chandra X-ray Science Center
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory                tel:  +1 617 496 7701
60 Garden Street, MS 81                              fax:  +1 617 495 7356
Cambridge, MA 02138                             arots at head-cfa.harvard.edu
USA                                     http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~arots/
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