Antarctic Time

[Ethan Dicks]

Howdy all, 

Ethan Dicks here.  I'm a computer tech at McMurdo Station who has been
sleuthing why my clock on my OpenWin desktop didn't display the correct
local time this morning (N.Z. just changed to DST about 20 hours ago),
and dug up this mailing list from the docs in the zoneinfo source.

It appears as if I've just missed most of the fun of verifying Antarctic
time, but I did notice that Palmer Station is not represented in the recently
released tables... I am researching the history of Palmer's timezone; for the
past few years (I don't know how many yet), it keeps the same time as Punta
Arenas, Chile, because, just like us and the South Pole, that's the other end
of their supply line.

Palmer is located at 64.8S by 64.1W, i.e.,

AQ      -6448-6406      Antarctica/Palmer       Palmer Station, Anvers Island

A footnote on the McMurdo/South Pole timezone issue - our wall clocks and
wristwatches are set to N.Z. time (with DST, when appropriate).  Our UNIX
machines are set to UTC to simplify timestamps on collected data.  Desktop
machines (Macs and PCs) are set to wall time, however.

Please include me on this list for the time being.  For the summer season at
least, I'm taking care of a bunch of UNIX machines and would like the xclocks
to display the correct local time.

-ethan

--
Ethan Dicks  erd at infinet.com |"Getting up, that is a problem.  I've always had 
McMurdo Station,  Antarctica | a hard time getting up when it's dark outside."
   erd at csec.mcmurdo.gov      |"But in space, it's always dark."
http://www.infinet.com/~erd/ |"I know...I know" - Sinclair & Ivanova, Babylon 5