NAME

Time::UTC::Now - determine current time in UTC correctly

DESCRIPTION

This module is one answer to the question "what time is it?".
It determines the current time on the UTC scale, handling leap seconds
correctly, and puts a bound on how inaccurate it could be.  It is the
rigorously correct approach to determining civil time.  It is designed
to interoperate with Time::UTC, which knows all about the UTC time scale.

UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) is a time scale derived from
International Atomic Time (TAI).  UTC divides time up into days, and
each day into seconds.  The seconds are atomically-realised SI seconds,
of uniform length.  Most UTC days are exactly 86400 seconds long,
but occasionally there is a day of length 86401 s or (theoretically)
86399 s.  These leap seconds are used to keep the UTC day approximately
synchronised with the non-uniform rotation of the Earth.  (Prior to 1972
a different mechanism was used for UTC, but that's not an issue here.)

Because UTC days have differing lengths, instants on the UTC scale
are identified here by the combination of a day number and a number
of seconds since midnight within the day.  In this module the day
number is the integral number of days since 1958-01-01, which is the
epoch of the TAI scale which underlies UTC.  This is the convention
used by the "Time::UTC" module.  That module has some functions to
format these numbers for display.  For a more general solution, use the
"utc_day_to_mjdn" function to translate to a standard Modified Julian
Day Number or the "utc_day_to_cjdn" function to translate to a standard
Chronological Julian Day Number, which can be used as input to a calendar
module.

INSTALLATION

	perl Build.PL
	./Build
	./Build test
	./Build install

AUTHOR

Andrew Main (Zefram) <zefram@fysh.org>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2006, 2007, 2009 Andrew Main (Zefram) <zefram@fysh.org>

LICENSE

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
