this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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[–] nBodyProblem@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The BEST way is to use the number of seconds after the J2000 epoch (The Gregorian date January 1, 2000, at 12:00 Terrestrial Time)

[–] arc@lemm.ee 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

ISO 8601 goes from 1582 (Julian calendar adoption) but can go even further with agreement about intention and goes down beyond the millisecond. Not sure why I want an integer from the year 2000 which only represents seconds.

[–] nBodyProblem@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago

Simplicity and precision.

Who said it was only measured as an integer? Seconds are a decimal value and many timekeeping applications require higher precision than to the millisecond. Referencing an epoch closer to our current time allows greater precision with a single double-precision floating point number.

Want to reference something before J2000? Use a negative number.

It’s independent of earth rotation, so no need to consider leap second updates either unless you are converting to UTC. It’s an absolute measure of time elapsed.