Yeah, Right, Whatever

Like the more well-known time adjustment, the leap year, a "leap second" is tacked on to clocks every so often to keep them correct.

Earth's trip around the sun — our year with all its seasons — is about 365.2422 days long, which we round to 365 to keep things simpler. But every four years, we add 0.2422 x 4 days (that's about one day) at the end of the month of February (extending it from 28 to 29 days) to fix the calendar.

Likewise, a "leap second" is added on to our clocks every so often to keep them in synch with the somewhat unpredictable nature of our planet's rotation, the roughly 24-hour whirl that brings the sun into the sky each morning.

...The new extra second will be added on the last day of this year at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time — 6:59:59 pm Eastern Standard Time.

Mechanisms such as the Internet-based Network Time Protocol and the satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) depend on the accurate time kept by atomic clocks.

// posted by Beth @ 6:59 AM |