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Subject:Re: Days of the year From:Joe Miller <joemiller -at- CANBERRA -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 24 Nov 1997 17:44:09 -0500
John,
>The programmer insists on calling it a Julain date, but the way i
>understand Julian, it is numbered where 1 is, I believe, somewhere
>in the 15th century?
I think what's being referred to here is not a date in the Julian
calendar, but the modified julian date often used in programming.
"This [the modified julian date] is a continuous count of
the number of days elapsed since 17 November 1858.
It is often more useful than conventional calendar dates
for record keeping over long periods of time, since the
MJD's of two events can easily be subtracted to determine
the time difference in days. Usually, the MJD is specified
as a number with 5 significant digits. As an example, the
MJD for 1 January 1995 is 49718, meaning that this many
days have elapsed between 17 November 1858 and
1 January 1995."
