Re: A few questions

[Dennis Lee Bieber <wlfraed@ix.netcom.com>]

On Sun, 1 Nov 2015 05:42:16 -0800 (PST), brbarkstrom@gmail.com declaimed
the following:

>To put it simply, Astronomical Julian Date (and relatives) produces 
>a uniform time record in seconds,  It also makes sure that all dates/times
>are reduced to the same time zone at the Greenwich meridian.  The usual
>IT convention (YYYYMMDD) is non-uniform (for example, Feb. may have 28
>or 29 days - while Jul. always has 31).  It would seem that if your
>application might move to a geographically distributed environment,
>the Julian Date would be sensible.  On the other hand, Julian Date is
>not readily interpretable to humans.
>

	There's also the minor touch that the "day" rolls over at noon, not
midnight. After all, when one's work runs the dark hours, who wants to
fiddle with a day change in the middle of one's observations.

	If the dates don't need to go back too far (Nov 17 1858, Modified
Julian Date is usable, and puts the day change back to midnight. As I
recall MJD was the reference point used by the VMS operating system.
-- 
	Wulfraed                 Dennis Lee Bieber         AF6VN
    wlfraed@ix.netcom.com    HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/