Thursday, January 01, 2009


It took me all day, but I was able to successfully capture the "leap second" on the time.gov website which shows the official U.S. time. At first, I was going to watch the US Naval Observatory site, which displays the UTC time, but I looked at the html source and found it was just sampling the atomic clock time every 3 minutes and so would not really show the leap second.

I also got a copy of Quick Screenshot Maker, which was able to capture and save an area of the screen at one second intervals.

I had to be at the laptop at 7 PM because the java displaying the time would fail occasionally. So then it was just wait-and-see and, sure enough, the leap second showed up as 18:59:60.