An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics
English-French-Persian

The uniform time-scale used as the independent variable to calculate the orbits in the solar system prior to 1984. Ephemeris Time was adopted in 1960 to deal with irregularities in the → Earth's rotation that had been found to affect the course of mean solar time. The definition of Ephemeris Time is based on Newcomb's analytical theory of the Earth's motion around the Sun (Newcomb 1898), according to which the geometric mean longitude of the Sun with respect to the Earth-Moon barycenter is expressed by:
L = 279° 41' 48".04 + 129 602 768".13 T + 1''.089 T²,
where L refers to the → mean equinox of date while T measures time from noon 1900 January 0 GMT in Julian centuries of 36525 days. Ephemeris Time is therefore defined as the instant near the beginning of the calendar year A.D. 1900 when the mean longitude of the Sun was 279° 41' 48''.04, at which instant the measure of ET was 1900 January 0, 12h precisely. In this system the fundamental unit was the → ephemeris second, which was defined so that the → tropical year at the epoch 1900.0 should be exactly 31 556 925,9747 seconds of ephemerides. Ephemeris Time was inconvenient in many ways and was supeseded with the → Terrestrial Dynamical Time (TDT), whose fundamental unit is the SI second.

→ ephemeris; → time.