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T. Fukushima (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)
At its 24th General Assembly held at Manchester last year, the IAU has adopted the Celestial Ephemeris Origin (CEO) as a new longitude origin of the celestial coordinate system (Capitaine et al. 2000, IAU 2001). The CEO is the application of Guinot's non-rotating origin (NRO) to the Earth's equator (Guinot 1979, Capitaine et al. 1986, Capitaine 1990).
By using the current IAU precession/nutation theory, we integrated the global orbit of CEO. It is a slightly curved zigzag pattern of the amplitude of around 23o moving secularly along the ecliptic. Among its kinematical features, we note that CEO has a large secular component of rotation with respect to the inertial reference frame. The current speed of this global rotation is as large as around -4.15 ''/yr. The negative sign shows that CEO rotates clockwise with respect to the inertial frame when viewed from the north celestial pole. Unfortunately this is a general property of NROs.
On the other hand, such secular rotation does not exist for some geometrically-defined longitude origins like K, H, and \Sigma already discussed in Kovalevsky and McCarthy (1998). We think that the existence of a global secular rotaion means that the CEO, and NROs in general, is not appropriate to be specified as the x-axis of celestial coordinate systems.