There is also an atomic clock placed on the space station to calculate the precise time for the UTC standard, but as a rule, astronauts adhere to the good old GMT | In military GMT is known as Zulu time |
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Ready to get your time right? In other words, Greenwich Mean Time has no UTC offset | At the same moment, it would be 4:25 pm Pacific Standard Time in California- but GMT would remain the same at 6:25 pm |
What is UTC or GMT Time? By convention, the world's weather communities use a twenty four hour clock, similar to "military" time based on the 0° longitude meridian, also known as the Greenwich meridian.
26Largest Cities in Greenwich Mean Time There are many major cities in the GMT time zone and in the GMT+1 times zone Daylight Saving Time | Because of the time zones across the world, you can leave Paris at 8am on Monday morning and find yourself back on Sunday in LA |
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This example is really about converting between GMT and local time | It turns out, the time on the International Space Station follows Greenwich Mean Time |
At the center of GMT is the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, which sits on the Greenwich Meridian, or longitude zero.
However, it is estimated that there are fewer people in GMT than there are in the EST time zone in the United States around 142 million people live in the EST time zone | Because of its consistency, GMT is used throughout the world |
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If you were to travel between the two, you would need to adjust your clock by three hours as soon as you crossed the border, even if it took you five minutes to complete the actual crossing… Go figure! This happened in the late nineteenth century when a Scottish-Canadian engineer and inventor Sandford Fleming proposed dividing the Earth into 24 slices of 15 degrees each | Each of these slices is a time zone, and each is coordinated using the Coordinated Universal Time UTC standard |
For the sake of clarity, though, just remember that GMT now defines a time zone along the zero longitude, while UTC is a precise time standard based on atomic clocks.
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