Please report in UT

Paul Lawler wrote:
Phil Wheeler wrote in news:vvgTc.3706$aB1.2170
@twister.socal.rr.com:


At the risk of using long words which will challenge your intellect:


UTC is "Coordinated Universal Time", or "Universal Time,
Coordinated". It is UTC instead of UCT because the abbreviation is
based on the initials in French, not English.


Ummm... don't you mean "instead of CUT?" g

Long discussion of that at the same web site g

Chris L Peterson wrote:

On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 04:26:03 GMT, Phil Wheeler wrote:


UTC is "Coordinated Universal Time", or "Universal Time,
Coordinated". It is UTC instead of UCT because the abbreviation is
based on the initials in French, not English.


Actually, it isn't. In French it would be TUC. In English, it would be CUT. The
abbreviation was chosen (politically) as a compromise, and is not a true
abbreviation in any language.



See

http://www.aldridge.com/utc.html

For more of this -- if it matters.

Paul Lawler wrote:
"Carsten A. Arnholm" wrote in message
...
Mike Fitterman wrote:
This really is a must. For folks that live in the US "CST" can mean
more than one thing. It can be confusing as hell for people who
live outside the US to figure out what our timezones map to.

I subscribe to that. I live in Norway and I don't know what CST
represents, and most people I know don't know that either. One
really cannot expect all other people to look up all other time zone
designations around the world (at least not if you expect them to
get it right). I use UT all the time, and also avoid the troublesome
summertime ("daylight saving time") issues.

That's fine if you live within a couple of hours of UT, but you have
to admit it sounds a little silly (actually a lot silly) in an
observing report to say, "I started observing at 9am but the best
objects were not visible until 11 am when the sky was really dark."

But you don't say that. There is no AM or PM in Universal Time. Look it up.
There is no silliness involved.

Clear skies
Carsten A. Arnholm
http://arnholm.org/
N59.776 E10.457

Phil Wheeler wrote:

[rearranged for clarity]

Mike Fitterman wrote:

This really is a must. For folks that live in the US "CST" can mean more
than one thing. It can be confusing as hell for people who live outside the
US to figure out what our timezones map to.

Mike.


"AstronomyWanaB" wrote in message
news
I sure wish most here would report in UT various events observed.
Local time has no meaning if your 1000's of kms away. DO IT IN UT WILL
YA??!

OTOH -- those who live in UT (Utah) could become very confused :-)

Phil


Well, that's what I thought. "He must want more trip reports from Utah
or something..."

Most of us here think of GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), not UT. I have no
idea what the offset from GMT is for Pacific Daylight Time (for instance).

--
Pat O'Connell
[note munged EMail address]
Take nothing but pictures, Leave nothing but footprints,
Kill nothing but vandals...

Stephen Tonkin wrote in news:6zBSHQNK
:

Paul Lawler wrote:
[...]
and if I tell you where I am, then you can
do the UT math just as well as I can,

If the observer does the arithmetic, it has to be done exactly once. If
every reader has to do it, it has to be done n times, where n1. To my
mind it shows courtesy to one's readers to do the arithmetic for them.
YMMV.

Okay... you definitely have a point here. Well made... and taken.

Stephen Tonkin wrote in message ...

Straw man: no-one is suggesting that people should do that. What is
being suggested is that people state "I began observing at 09:00 UT..."

I hate to respond to a thread started by a known troll, but I've got
to defend Paul Lawler here. If you are discussing an event that looks
more or less the same from all over the world, e.g. an occultation,
then it is indeed incumbent on you to report in UT.

But if you are describing a typical deep-sky observing session,
where you browsed through a bunch of deep-sky objects that won't
change at all for the next millenium, then UT is an annoying
distraction. In that case, it's much more helpful to know the
observer's local time, so that you have a sense of how the
objects were placed in the sky, and how the observing session
fit into the observer's daily routine. The UT is utterly
irrelevant; the session would have been the same at 10 pm
local time in New York, Rome, or Beijing.

A comfortable compromise is to make sure that you *always* report
both in local time and in UT. That also sidesteps the problem of
not knowing the abbreviations for time zones. If you see somebody
say "I started observing at 9 p.m. Aug 14 CDT (02:00 UT Aug 15),"
then it's easy enough to figure out that CDT is a local time zone,
and if you really care, you can do the math and figure out which
one. In the case of meteor observations, it's also useful to know
*both* the UT *and* the local time, since meteors are faster and
more frequent in the morning than in the evening.

Two other pieces of information rarely posted that are very
relevant in describing an observing session are latitude and
degree of light pollution.

- Tony Flanders

I agree with your logic, Tony. I disagree with the entire concept of
telling folks HOW to report their observations. I'm pleased just to see
the reports and do my own time conversions -- so long as they tell me
their local time and zone.

Phil

Tony Flanders wrote:

Stephen Tonkin wrote in message ...


Straw man: no-one is suggesting that people should do that. What is
being suggested is that people state "I began observing at 09:00 UT..."


I hate to respond to a thread started by a known troll, but I've got
to defend Paul Lawler here. If you are discussing an event that looks
more or less the same from all over the world, e.g. an occultation,
then it is indeed incumbent on you to report in UT.

But if you are describing a typical deep-sky observing session,
where you browsed through a bunch of deep-sky objects that won't
change at all for the next millenium, then UT is an annoying
distraction. In that case, it's much more helpful to know the
observer's local time, so that you have a sense of how the
objects were placed in the sky, and how the observing session
fit into the observer's daily routine. The UT is utterly
irrelevant; the session would have been the same at 10 pm
local time in New York, Rome, or Beijing.

A comfortable compromise is to make sure that you *always* report
both in local time and in UT. That also sidesteps the problem of
not knowing the abbreviations for time zones. If you see somebody
say "I started observing at 9 p.m. Aug 14 CDT (02:00 UT Aug 15),"
then it's easy enough to figure out that CDT is a local time zone,
and if you really care, you can do the math and figure out which
one. In the case of meteor observations, it's also useful to know
*both* the UT *and* the local time, since meteors are faster and
more frequent in the morning than in the evening.

Two other pieces of information rarely posted that are very
relevant in describing an observing session are latitude and
degree of light pollution.

- Tony Flanders

On 15 Aug 2004 05:40:02 -0700, (Tony Flanders) wrote:

I hate to respond to a thread started by a known troll, but I've got
to defend Paul Lawler here. If you are discussing an event that looks
more or less the same from all over the world, e.g. an occultation,
then it is indeed incumbent on you to report in UT.

But if you are describing a typical deep-sky observing session,
where you browsed through a bunch of deep-sky objects that won't
change at all for the next millenium, then UT is an annoying
distraction...

Agreed. I try to use the time in the way that makes most sense to my audience
(who may not be astronomers). For my deep sky images, I normally don't provide
any time at all, since that information really doesn't add any useful
information (I might add a comment if I was near the horizon). For fireballs, I
provide local time, since virtually everyone following fireball reports is local
(and most don't know what UT even is). For meteor showers, I provide both, since
individual meteors are of local interest but the shower dynamics are global. For
solar images, I use UT, since the appearance changes over the short term and is
seen everywhere.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

Tony Flanders wrote:
But if you are describing a typical deep-sky observing session, where
you browsed through a bunch of deep-sky objects that won't change at
all for the next millenium, then UT is an annoying distraction.

Agreed. For DSOs, time of any sort (except sidereal :-) ) is entirely
superfluous. What is useful is approximate altitude of object and sky
conditions.

Best,
Stephen

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Stephen Tonkin wrote in message ...

Agreed. For DSOs, time of any sort (except sidereal :-) ) is entirely
superfluous. What is useful is approximate altitude of object and sky
conditions.

Technically, that's true. But since most observing reports on s.a.a.
are more of the "I went out and had fun" kind than the "here's the
definitive description of XYZ object" kind, I find that knowing the
local time adds to the human interest.

Moreover, since most people who post on s.a.a. live between latitudes
30N and 50N, and I'm nearly halfway between, knowing that XYZ object
was visible at 10 p.m. in their local time clues me in that it will
also be visible around then in my own local time. Whereas if the
report starts out "I got up at 3:30 a.m. to observe XYZ", I might
think twice about adding it to my observing list.

Obviously, if I'm really serious about observing something, I'll
look up its co-ordinates and figure out where it fits in my plan
for the night. But knowing the original poster's local time is a
handy shortcut.

- Tony Flanders