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RDF Terms

Sidereal Hour

Sidereal time is a time-keeping system astronomers use to keep track of the direction to point their telescopes to view a given star in the night sky. A mean sidereal day is about 23 h 56 m 4.1 s in length. However, due to variations in the rotation rate of the Earth, the rate of an ideal sidereal clock deviates from any simple multiple of a civil clock. In practice, the difference is kept track of by the difference UTC-UT1, which is measured by radio telescopes and kept on file and available to the public at the IERS and at the United States Naval Observatory. A Sidereal Hour is \(1/24^{th}\) of a Sidereal Day. A mean sidereal day is 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.0916 seconds (23.9344699 hours or 0.99726958 mean solar days), the time it takes Earth to make one rotation relative to the vernal equinox. (Due to nutation, an actual sidereal day is not quite so constant.) The vernal equinox itself precesses slowly westward relative to the fixed stars, completing one revolution in about 26,000 years, so the misnamed sidereal day ("sidereal" is derived from the Latin sidus meaning "star") is 0.0084 seconds shorter than Earth's period of rotation relative to the fixed stars.

3590.17

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_time

hr{sidereal}

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