Julian day
The Julian day or Julian day number (JDN) is the integer number of days that have elapsed since the initial epoch defined as noon Universal Time (UT) Monday, January 1, 4713 BC in the proleptic Julian calendar. That noon-to-noon day is counted as Julian day 0. Thus the multiples of 7 are Mondays. Negative values can also be used, although those predate all recorded history.
The Julian date (JD) is a continuous count of days and fractions elapsed since the same initial epoch. The integral part (its floor) gives the Julian day number. The fractional part gives the time of day since noon UT as a decimal fraction of one day or fractional day, with 0.5 representing midnight UT. Typically, a 64-bit floating point (double precision) variable can represent an epoch expressed as a Julian date to about 1 millisecond precision.
A Julian date of 2454115.05486 means that the date and Universal Time is Sunday 14 January 2007 at 13:18:59.9.
The decimal parts of a Julian date:
0.1 = 2.4 hours or 144 minutes or 8640 seconds
0.01 = 0.24 hours or 14.4 minutes or 864 seconds
0.001 = 0.024 hours or 1.44 minutes or 86.4 seconds
0.0001 = 0.0024 hours or 0.144 minutes or 8.64 seconds
0.00001 = 0.00024 hours or 0.0144 minutes or 0.864 seconds.
Almost 2.5 million Julian days have elapsed since the initial epoch. JDN 2,400,000 was November 16, 1858. JD 2,500,000.0 will occur on August 31, 2132 at noon UT.
The Julian day number can be considered a very simple calendar, where its calendar date is just an integer. This is useful for reference, computations, and conversions. It allows the time between any two dates in history to be computed by simple subtraction.
The Julian day system was introduced by astronomers to provide a single system of dates that could be used when working with different calendars and to unify different historical chronologies. Apart from the choice of the zero point and name, this Julian day and Julian date are not directly related to the Julian calendar, although it is possible to convert any date from one calendar to the other.
Julian Date
Historical Julian Dates were recorded relative to GMT or Ephemeris Time, but the International Astronomical Union now recommends that Julian Dates be specified in Terrestrial Time, and that when necessary to specify Julian Dates using a different time scale, that the time scale used be indicated when required, such as JD(UT1). The fraction of the day is found by converting the number of hours, minutes, and seconds after noon into the equivalent decimal fraction.
The term Julian date is also used to refer to:
- Julian calendar dates
- ordinal dates (day-of-year)
The use of Julian date to refer to the day-of-year (ordinal date) is usually considered to be incorrect, however it is widely used that way in the earth sciences and computer programming.
See also
- Astronomical year numbering
- Calculating the day of the week
- Calendrical calculation
- Calendar
- Calendar date
- Calendar reform
- Computus
- Easter
- Ephemeris
- Intercalary month
- Leap year
- Old Style and New Style dates
- Passover
- Year zero
License
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Julian day".
