A clock to mimick a normal office clock, but with a little wheel in the back that lets astronomy-interested owner adjust the length of a 24-hour day to match the actual speed of some other planet's rotation.-- jutta, Sep 15 1999 Prague Town Hall clock. http://www.discover...e/oldtownhall_v.jpgA really cool 600 year old clock... [StarChaser, Sep 15 1999] (?) More information on it. http://otokar.troja.../RelatGrp/Orloj.htmMore in-depth info, including that it was burned down by the Nazis in WW2. [StarChaser, Sep 15 1999] Thanks to the commentators that have helped me progress from medieval to rennaissance models of planetary motion. Obviously, (1) astronomy needs to become a school subject and (2) I shouldn't be involved in setting the curriculum...-- jutta, Dec 21 1999 Reportedly, during the Mars Pathfinder mission, a number of JPL operations techs started sleeping on Mars time so they'd be awake when the (solar-powered) lander was active.
Since (as far as I know) this idea hasn't come to pass yet, I presume they used computer programs and Mars/Earth time tables.-- egnor, Mar 05 2000 In a similar vein, there are clocks available that run on what astronomers call sidereal time. This is the time it takes for an object to return to the same apparent position in the sky (off-setting the Earth's movement around the sun)-- mj, Mar 30 2000 In a different artery, has anyone seen the 'astronomical clock' in the city of Prague? I'd love to have a screensaver of that thing that kept time...-- StarChaser, Apr 24 2000 It'd be really cool if it was three dimensional with all sorts of orbit gizmos and such.-- salmon, Dec 14 2000 I knew these guys who decided to go onto a 10 hour day to be more in tune with the metric system. They would sleep from hours 9-1, eat at a certain hour, etc. regardless of when that occured in the real world. Needless to say, they didn't attend too many of their classes, and failed out of school, but hey, it was pretty funny.-- MuddDog, Jun 11 2001 The French tried to do a metric clock after the revolution...it bombed too.-- StarChaser, Jun 11 2001 [salmon]: That's called an "orrery", and they do exist.
[MuddDog], [StarChaser]: We have metric calendar ideas in plenty... isn't there a metric time idea floating around here somewhere?-- egnor, Jun 11 2001 halfbakery