AAS 203rd Meeting, January 2004
Session 134 Solar System and The Sun
Oral, Thursday, January 8, 2004, 2:00-3:30pm, Regency VI

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[134.05] Calendar Reform: Bob McClenon's Calendar

R. C. Henry (Maryland Space Grant Consortium)

The world's presently-used Gregorian calendar is extremely clumsy, because the Gregorian calendar repeats only after 400 years (Seidelman 1961), and therefore organizations, including the AAS, have to re-work their calendar each and every year. This work is totally unnecessary. I propose that the American Astronomical Society advocate the world-wide adoption of the CCC&T calendar, which is an adaptation of Bob McClenon's Calendar, a brilliant fix which results in the calendar being identical every year. This calendar is far superior to previously suggested reformed calendars, in that it does not break the cycle of the days of the week, ever! Pragmatic (and more than adequate) synchronization with the seasons is achieved by the introduction of an extra week-long ``month" every four or five years at the end of June; I propose that this seven-day month be called Newton. The target for adoption is 2006 Jan 1, and at the same time, universal use of universal time should be adopted, making the date and time identical everywhere on Earth. Time zones remain as ``hours of work" zones, EST for example becoming ``14 o'clock to 22 o'clock" for a ``nine-to-five" job. The economic benefit that astronomers could provide the world through shepherding this simple reform would easily and indeed more than repay all that the world has kindly spent on astronomical research.

This work was supported by NASA's Maryland Space Grant Consortium.

Seidelman, K. 1961, Explanatory Supplement to ``The Astronomical Ephemeris" and ``The American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac," (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office), p. 407


If you would like more information about this abstract, please follow the link to http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/calendarDir/calendar.reform.html. This link was provided by the author. When you follow it, you will leave the Web site for this meeting; to return, you should use the Back comand on your browser.

The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: henry@jhu.edu

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