[fitsbits] Future of UTC

[Steve Allen]

At various intervals over the past three years we have seen indications
that UTC might be re-defined by discontinuing all further leap seconds.
The fate of UTC may be determined by a meeting which will be held in
Torino next month.  Announcements of this colloquium can be found at
http://www.mail-archive.com/leapsecs@rom.usno.navy.mil/msg00120.html
http://www.iers.org/iers/publications/messages/message_040.txt
http://www.boulder.nist.gov/timefreq/seminars/utc_italy.htm

For those who are outside of the UTC change process it has been
difficult to ascertain what is happening.  I have assembled a
bibliography of all online documents pertaining to the Future of UTC.
See below for the URL....

A change such as this will have consequences for many telescopes and
data acquisition systems, and among those is likely to be the need to
upgrade software that acquires and writes timestamps into FITS files.

Several surveys of UTC users have been performed.  Nevertheless, I
believe that some schedule and cost consequences of discontinuing leap
seconds have not been adequately measured -- especially for older
optical and infrared telescopes.

The bibliography and a survey about schedule and cost consequences
are available at the following URL:

http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/

--
Steve Allen          UCO/Lick Observatory       Santa Cruz, CA 95064
sla at ucolick.org      Voice: +1 831 459 3046     http://www.ucolick.org/~sla
PGP: 1024/E46978C5   F6 78 D1 10 62 94 8F 2E    49 89 0E FE 26 B4 14 93