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Slightly tweak discussion of uniform time scales
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brandon-rhodes committed Mar 1, 2024
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Expand Up @@ -757,7 +757,7 @@ What are these three different uniform time scales?
International Atomic Time (TAI) is maintained
by the worldwide network of atomic clocks
referenced by researchers with a need for very accurate time.
The official leap second table
The official :ref:`leap second table <the-leap-second-table>`
is actually a table of offsets between TAI and UTC.
At the end of June 2012, for example,
the TAI−UTC offset was changed from 34.0 to 35.0
Expand All @@ -769,10 +769,14 @@ were already maintaining a uniform time scale of their own
before TAI was established,
using a slightly different starting point for the day.
For practical purposes, TT is simply TAI
plus exactly 32.184 seconds.
plus exactly 32.184 seconds.
So it is now more than a minute ahead of UTC.
You can also retrieve Terrestrial Time as a floating point number of years
of exactly 365.25 days each:

You can not only ask Skyfield for TT as a Julian date and a calendar date,
but as a floating-point number of years
of exactly 365.25 days each —
a value which is often used as the time parameter
in long-term astronomical formulae:

.. testcode::

Expand All @@ -790,10 +794,10 @@ and therefore unaffected by the Earth’s motion.
The acceleration that Earth experiences in its orbit —
sometimes speeding up, sometimes slowing down —
varies the rate at which our atomic clocks
seem to run to an outside observer,
run relative to an outside observer,
as predicted by Einstein’s theory of General Relativity.
So physical simulations of the Solar System tend to use TDB,
which is continuous with the *T*\ :sub:`eph` time scale
So physical simulations of the Solar System use TDB as their clock.
It is considered equivalent to the *T*\ :sub:`eph` time scale
traditionally used for Solar System and spacecraft simulations
at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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