[tz] Mozambique officially uses LMT?

Philip Paeps philip at trouble.is
Thu Aug 30 10:29:30 UTC 2018


On 2018-08-30 03:52:32 (+0200), Paul Eggert wrote:
> Steve Allen wrote:
>> I cannot say for sure whether this is a mistake, an official doing
>> these calculations the way things used to work, or whether outlying
>> towns still set their clocks using a stick in the ground.
>
> tzdb cites a Portuguese decree dated 1911-05-26 
> <https://dre.pt/application/dir/pdf1sdip/1911/05/12500/23132313.pdf> 
> saying that Mozambique switched to +02 at 1912-01-01 00:00 +02, and I 
> can't find anything online suggesting that this change didn't stick. 
> For what it's worth, the 2012 Atlas de Precipitação Moçambique 
> <http://www.inam.gov.mz/images/Climatologia/ATLAS-INAM-FINAL-Por-Ser-Printada.pdf>, 
> also published by INAM, says on page 2 that precipitation readings are 
> taken at 07:00 UTC (09:00 local time).
>
> That being said, Mozambique (or a good chunk of it, anyway) was ruled 
> by Arab traders for centuries, and the Arab world has a history of 
> disagreeing with Western timekeeping, so it's conceivable that solar 
> time survives in some circles.

It may be worth checking whether the individual documenting the lunar 
eclipse didn't just copy the rubric from the previous eclipse.

Arguably, using LMT to document celestial observations makes more sense 
than using civil time.  Not being influenced by politics, it makes 
observations decades or centuries apart easier to correlate.

Philip

-- 
Philip Paeps
Senior Reality Engineer
Ministry of Information


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