Webinar times

[Gary Gawthrope]

I watched the webinar earlier & it gave the time for the Saturday webinar as 2:30pm

When i looked on the events page its shown as 1:30pm

I’m also sure when i looked last week at the time of the Friday webinar about 30 yrs of Hubble it was 12 noon til 1pm but now its 11am til 12 noon

Can someone confirm the times for these 2 events?

Gary

[Dominic Ford]

The times are as follows (all times in BST):

Friday 24 April – 12 noon – A Special Image for the 30th Anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope
Saturday 25 April – 2.30pm – Spring webinar

I’m not sure where you saw these erroneous times.

[Gary Gawthrope]

thanks for that dominic

the events page (https://britastro.org/meetings) both show these as an hour earlier

and the individual details pages (https://britastro.org/hst30 & https://britastro.org/node/21617) are also an hour earlier

i’ve attached screenshots of what i’m seeing

Gary

[Gary Gawthrope]

Hi Dominic,

I’ve fixed the problem – in my account the timezone was set to UTC, I’ve changed this to London & its showing the correct times

Gary

[Dr Paul Leyland]

We are all, notionally at least, astronomers and invariably use UT to report events we have observed. Predictions of future events, such as are published in the BAA Handbook, are invariably given in UT.

Can those who organize events for a future date and time please explicitly specify the time(s) in UT?

I missed an exoclock meeting because the organizers quoted 16:30GMT when they meant 16:30BST.  I was not the only person to do so. Had the time been advertised as 15:30UT all would have been unambiguous.

[Robin Leadbeater]

Unless otherwise explicitly stated I always assume events organised by humans are in the organiser’s  local time. It has not let me down yet 😉

In this case however the browser is changing the time shown on the website to the readers local time which in my view cannot be a good idea. 

[Dr Paul Leyland]

I agree, except that long years experience in the field of computer security has taught me that what the organizer may consider “local” is profoundly ambiguous.  All too often it is just plain wrong.  In the case I noted, the organizer was just plain wrong: she explicitly stated “GMT” but meant “BST”.

There are other considerations. For example, the term “EST” is ambiguous,  By and large it means UTC-5 but is very frequently interpreted as UTC+10 in Australia.

That is why CERTs are very strongly advised to use UTC and ISO-standard date formats in their communications.

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