* Theory: Improve citation to Morrison & Stephenson.

Mention the 1972 UTC transition.  See Steve Allen in
<http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2013-September/019770.html>.
This commit is contained in:
Paul Eggert
2013-09-02 01:51:15 -07:00
parent 28cf16f575
commit 614b193e52
+10 -6
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@@ -240,12 +240,16 @@ locations differ in LMT. Historically, not only did different
locations in the same zone typically use different LMT offsets, often
different people in the same location maintained mean-time clocks that
differed significantly, many people used solar or some other time
instead of mean time, and standard time often replaced LMT only gradually
at each location. As for leap seconds, we don't know the history
of earth's rotation accurately enough to map SI seconds to historical
solar time to more than about one-hour accuracy; see Stephenson FR
(2003), Historical eclipses and Earth's rotation, A&G 44: 2.22-2.27
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.1468-4004.2003.44222.x>.
instead of mean time, and standard time often replaced LMT only
gradually at each location. As for leap seconds, civil time was not
based on atomic time before 1972, and we don't know the history of
earth's rotation accurately enough to map SI seconds to historical
solar time to more than about one-hour accuracy. See: Morrison LV,
Stephenson FR. Historical values of the Earth's clock error Delta T
and the calculation of eclipses. J Hist Astron. 2004;35:327-36
<http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2004JHA....35..327M>; Historical
values of the Earth's clock error. J Hist Astron. 2005;36:339
<http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2005JHA....36..339M>.
As noted in the README file, the tz database is not authoritative
(particularly not for pre-1970 time stamps), and it surely has errors.