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In addition, an epoch optionally prefixed by "J" and designated as a year with decimals (2000 + x), where x is either positive or negative and is quoted to 1 or 2 decimal places, has come to mean a date that is an interval of x Julian years of 365.25 days away from the epoch J2000 = JD 2451545.0 (TT), still corresponding (in spite of the use of ...
Julian within its name indicates that other Julian epochs can be a number of Julian years of 365.25 days each before or after J2000.0. For example, the future epoch J2100.0 will be exactly 36,525 days (one Julian century) from J2000.0 at 12:00 TT on January 1, 2100 (the dates will still agree because the Gregorian century 2000–2100 will have ...
For example, Unix time is represented as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970, not counting leap seconds. An epoch in astronomy is a reference time used for consistency in calculation of positions and orbits. A common astronomical epoch is J2000, which is noon on January 1, 2000, Terrestrial Time.
As stated above, the Julian date (JD) of any instant is the Julian day number for the preceding noon in Universal Time plus the fraction of the day since that instant. Ordinarily calculating the fractional portion of the JD is straightforward; the number of seconds that have elapsed in the day divided by the number of seconds in a day, 86,400.
This means that the Earth's rotational North pole does not point quite at the J2000 celestial pole at the epoch J2000.0; the true pole of epoch nutates away from the mean one. The same differences pertain to the equinox. [9] The "J" in the prefix indicates that it is a Julian equinox or epoch rather than a Besselian equinox or epoch.
More exactly, sidereal time is the angle, measured along the celestial equator, from the observer's meridian to the great circle that passes through the March equinox (the northern hemisphere's vernal equinox) and both celestial poles, and is usually expressed in hours, minutes, and seconds.
J2000: One commonly used ECI frame is defined with the Earth's Mean Equator and Mean Equinox (MEME) at 12:00 Terrestrial Time on 1 January 2000. It can be referred to as J2K, J2000 or EME2000. The x-axis is aligned with the mean vernal equinox.
TT differs from Geocentric Coordinate Time (TCG) by a constant rate. Formally it is defined by the equation = +, where TT and TCG are linear counts of SI seconds in Terrestrial Time and Geocentric Coordinate Time respectively, is the constant difference in the rates of the two time scales, and is a constant to resolve the epochs (see below).