Observatory & Server Time

I want the website to display the correct time independently of the clocks on the server or the reader's client computer. I arbitrarily define the time on my computer to be correct, since it is the only one of the three that I can monitor and control directly. In order to display the correct time in content provided by the server, scripts on the server have to apply a correction factor to the server's time. This correction not only accounts for any server clock error, it also accommodates the time zone difference between the server and my observatory.

To establish this correction factor, I periodically measure the difference in time between my clock and the server's clock. This is done automatically, once a week. The correction factor is stored on the server and applied to all times displayed by the website.

Note that the times displayed are static: they do not keep time continuously. The displayed time is the time at which you loaded the page. The longer you stay on the page, the more out of date the displayed time will become.