What Time Is It?

Project #1

Write an answer for the following questions (in your own words)

  1. What is GMT time and where is measured from?
  2. What is UTC time?
  3. What is TAI time?
  4. How are UTC, TAI, and GMT related? Why?
  5. What is DST time?
  6. How is DST related to the others?
  7. What is (UT or UT1) time?
  8. How is (UT or UT1) related to the others?
  9. What is a leap second? Why is it used?
  10. What is the epoch start time for UTC, TAI, ...

Project #2

Create and interactive program that ...

  1. When the program first starts, display these definitions to the user
    • UTC
    • TAI
  2. Loop:
    1. Ask the user to enter a time value (UTC or TAI) in a specific format
    2. If nothing was entered, exit
    3. Convert and display all versions of the time
      (Is the day/month/year important to the conversion?)

Links

(Wikipedia) Time zone
(Wikipedia) Barycentric Dynamical Time
(Wikipedia) Coordinated Universal Time
(Wikipedia) Daylight saving time
(Wikipedia) International Atomic Time
(Wikipedia) Universal Time

Time and Dates (astropy.time)