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Post by Bill Von Sennet on Aug 22, 2008 12:36:21 GMT -5
GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) is based on celestial observations made at the Greenwich Royal Observatory in London. Greenwich is of course the origin of the Zero, or Prime Meridian, used for measuring both time and longitude globally. With improving technologies came the introduction of various flavours of Universal Time (UT), which I won't bore you with. The most recent variation of UT is UTC (Universal Time Coordinated), which is based on a global network of caesium atomic clocks. Periodically, leap seconds are added to UTC to keep it within 900mS of GMT, (the Earth's rotation is very gradually slowing down, so GMT "runs slow"). The military uses UTC, but have renamed it "Zulu" after the phonetic code for "Z", representing the Zero meridian. The Zulu representation is gaining widespread usage in civillian arenas, particularly aviation and shipping. And, in case anyone wonders, yes there are Alpha, Bravo etc timezones. Wink
Posted by Fingers September 14, 2005
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