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I realize that many of you have heard of this before, but at the same time, some of you haven't. And since "Cosmos," hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, which starts tonight on Fox TV (here in the US) at 9pm EDT is getting a lot of "buzz", I thought it might be worth bringing it up again. Two years ago when I described this, for most people the answer was a quizzical "Neil de-who?", but now he is famous and should continue to be for the next three months at least.

Back in October of 2011 I presented a paper at a conference on leap seconds held at the campus of AGI in Exton, Pennsylvania. Attending were various physicists and astrophysicists including Ken Seidelmann whom some of you know most recently as the editor of the "Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac" and also George Kaplan who wrote a bunch of highly significant papers in the modern theory of celestial navigation (https://gkaplan.us/). There were a dozen other physicists and astrophysicists with specialties in Earth rotation and orientation including some of those who specifically decide when a leap second will be inserted in the calendar.

My paper presented at the conference was about the impact of leap seconds on manual celestial navigation and in particular the potential impact of the elimination of leap seconds from UTX (UTC without leap seconds). This paper was published in the journal of the AAS and you can read it here: https://www.cacr.caltech.edu/futureofutc/2011/preprints/20_AAS_11-669_Reed.pdf

A surprise attendee at the conference was Neil deGrasse Tyson, who said he had decided to attend because he's fascinated by time and the public is fascinated by time. Daylight Saving Time, he noted (coincidentally), is a perennial favorite topic for public discussions. Tyson was his jovial self, enlivening discussions with basic questions and even pop culture references, and he was busy through the whole two-day conference collecting materials for his various productions. At one point in the morning session, he asked jokingly, "what did they call an orrery before the Earl or Orrery put his name on it?" And I said, "Ah, that one I know. It was called a 'planetarium'." Having been the Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City for many years, he was amused --amused as much that he didn't know that as anything else! Between sessions, we talked about time offsets from UT in Android smartphones versus iPhones and other "pop science" topics. Not long after, he came up to me and asked if he could interview me for his radio show over lunch. He wanted someone to talk up the basic background science regarding the Earth's slight variability in rotation. You can listen to the interview here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/time-lords-the-science-of-keeping-time/
There are two or three minutes with me at two different points in the program. You (NavList readers) almost certainly won't learn anything new here. I'm just posting about this again so that you can tell your friends "I know a guy who met that guy" when people are talking about "Cosmos" tomorrow.

In the attached conference photo, I've marked me and Tyson for general consumption. In addition, for NavList, George Kaplan is on the far left in the photo in a brown jacket, and Ken Seidelmann is in a black suit with a blue tie (no hat) three people to the left of me in the photo.

-FER

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