This thread seems to have brought out some less than excellentness. Some trimming. Might not have got it all but that's not a license to snap back.Be excellent to each other. All the time, every time. Time threads are not exempt.
I personally always liked the KSR timeslip to deal with the extra length of the day, but to me it doesn't make sense to have it be right at midnight. Too many people are still active then. I would have it occur around 2am-4am, when almost everyone is sleeping.
Personally, I don't see why the synodic Earth-Mars cycle should be the base. Is not like it won't be handled by people expert in astronavigation. Simple time is important for normal life.
January - December could repeat every half year, months would have to be denoted with something like H1 and H2 or equivalent.
Quote from: Dao Angkan on 03/24/2017 12:50 amJanuary - December could repeat every half year, months would have to be denoted with something like H1 and H2 or equivalent.Well, if we need to distinguish which particular January we're talking about - as opposed to the instant one - we do so by reference to the calendar year number. So last January was January, 2017; the one before that was January, 2016 etc. So, if you repeat the Jan-Dec monthly cycle twice per Martian solar year, then instead of numbering the years, you could number the half-years instead. The first H1 and H2 would be half-years ('demi-years', 'annums', some other terminology) 1 and 2; the second H1 and H2 would be 3 and 4; then 5 and 6 etc. You could tell whether you were in H1 or H2 simply by whether the half-year number was odd or even!
AbstractIn a generalized approach to calendar construction for Earth, two types of perpetual calendars (with dates fixed to the days of a week) were studied for Mars: with leap and skip days; and with leap and skip weeks. Calendars with skip days or weeks (omitted days or weeks) are preferable, because the frequency of skip years is appreciably lower than that of leap years. Unlike our terrestrial (Gregorian) calendar with a 2-parametric leap rule (periods of 4 and 400 years), a Mars calendar of comparable accuracy requires a 3-parametric rule with three periods. The rules derived possess this accuracy and represent an optimum solution. With the skip week calendar, which appears to be the best compromise for a calendar for Mars, an error of 1 day would occur (theoretically) in an interval >100,000 Martian years. (However, unknown secular changes in the length of the Martian year, an inaccuracy in the adopted value of its length, and possible non-uniform rotation of Mars, may affect the calendar accuracy over such long intervals of time.) A common year would have 672 Martian days distributed into 24 months of 28 days (of 4 weeks of 7 days each). In skip years a week at the end of the twelfth month would be omitted. The above most regular arrangement of months (corresponding to 12 bi-months) and a 7 day Martian week, also offer the possibility of conveniently adapting terrestrial month and day names to the calendar of Mars. The month names could be, e.g. Januarione, Januaryide; Februarione, Februaryide, etc., and those for days, e.g. Mondim, Tuesdim, etc.
I liked Jim's idea of stretching the last hour of the day rather than inserting a time-slip. But then I realized that if this is combined with time zones it gets confusing again, as each time zone would be stretching an hour at a different global time.How about say each hour consists of 61 minutes and 39 seconds? 24 such hours add up to the correct total, all hours are the same length everywhere on Mars, your computerized wristwatch does the math, and time zones are possible. You would hardly notice the difference for most human activities. But if you are timing a critical process, navigation, rocket launches, better just use units of seconds, just like the SI system is supposed to. I remember in the "Orbiter" space simulation program, all timestamps are in seconds, so you get things like "Launch will be at 57,322.7 seconds"Alternately, define the 'minute' to be a tiny bit longer, rather than the hour. It works out the same.
Ok, how about a Martian Sol consisting of 25 hours, each being 59 minutes 11 seconds long? Sure, you'd have to add a second every 100 sols to keep the clocks right, but that shouldn't be too hard to do.
Quote from: JasonAW3 on 03/27/2017 05:37 pmOk, how about a Martian Sol consisting of 25 hours, each being 59 minutes 11 seconds long? Sure, you'd have to add a second every 100 sols to keep the clocks right, but that shouldn't be too hard to do.Apologies if this has been covered up thread, but I have a strong suspicion that using UTC on Mars will be important in identifying the epoch of events in the scientific/astronomical world. By that I do not mean that UTC should be used as the Martian calendar but rather that there be an atomic clock on Mars that is synced to UTC.But that does mean that basic units like seconds, minutes and hours should not be changed from the earth standard.Carl
Instead of repeating January and December, perhaps create two new Mars themed months? Romuary and Remuary?