Seconds clock generator#

It was interesting to watch the displays. The leap second went off without a hitch. With our commands entered earlier, I waited around in the Time and Navigation gallery to see what would happen as the clock struck 8:00.

For us, that was 8:00 pm in Washington, DC. Leap seconds are always added at midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). From now on, we’ll use that to update the clock for future leap seconds. We also successfully tested the cable connection in the back of the atomic clock.

Seconds clock generator#

We told both the frequency standard and the time code generator to add the leap second on the last day of June. This required opening the front of the exhibit case and typing a series of commands on the keypad a few days before the leap second would occur. For our purposes, we just needed to keep our atomic clock in sync with the world’s time when the last leap second was added in June 2015.īecause our atomic clock is not connected to outside data sources, we had to add the leap second manually. There is a discussion about leap seconds and if they will continue to be added, but that is another story. To take this into account, in 1972 the International Telecommunications Union adopted “leap seconds.” A leap second is added whenever the Earth’s rotation gets out of sync compared to the international time reference measured with atomic clocks. With atomic clocks, we learned that the length of a day changes by a second here and there. In the past, time was measured using the rotation of the Earth. Except, of course, when we need to account for a leap second.

Our exhibition Time and Navigation features an atomic clock that will keep an accurate time within a tiny fraction of a second for the foreseeable future ( see my earlier post to learn how atomic clocks work and how we installed ours into the exhibition).