I'm not entirely sure why, but at some point I got it in my head to make up a calendar for Mars. The problem is that seconds and minutes don't add up to an even Martian day.
So I made up analogs to those units and gave them Latinesque names. Or maybe I looked up Latin equivalents. I can't remember, I wrote the initial version of this in 2006.
The initial conversion is from seconds to a punctum. All the other conversions up to months/lunes keep the same ratios as on Earth, so the net effect would be like if you had a clock that was running 2% slow.
- Punctum
- 1.0274875 seconds
- Minorum
- 60 puncta, 61.64925 seconds
- Horum
- 60 minora
- Sol
- 24 hora
- Lune
- 37 sols (38 if lune number is divisible by 9)
- Anno
- 18 lunes, 668 sols
Leap years wound up being a bit more complicated because the fraction isn't nicely close to ¼ like here. I added an end-of-year leap day on annos where division by 5 leaves a remainder of 0, 2 or 4, and the anno is not divisible by 50.
For sol names I stuck with mythology. For lune names I tried to pick things that were relevant to Mars. When I ran out of ideas I picked landers (yes, only the American ones -- I make no apologies) and then people who were important to space and science in general.
Sols:
- Heliosol
- Deimosol
- Phobosol
- Terrasol
- Aphrodisol
- Zeusol
- Cronosol
Lunes:
- Percival
- Asaph
- Giovanni
- Wells
- Burroughs
- Mariner
- Viking
- Sojourner
- Odyssey
- Spirit
- Phoenix
- Sagan
- Bradbury
- Gagarin
- Shepard
- Armstrong
- Tereshkova
- Ride
Here are some dates I decided to convert. I'm not sure why I set the zero point to 1795 BCE any more, I know I wanted to always have positive dates and going that far back all but guaranteed that. I'm just not sure why I picked that particular point.
Today's date: Terrasol, Sojourner 24th, 2030 19:24:34
E-mail format: Ter, 24 Soj 2030 19:24:34
2030-08-24M19:24:34 = +2024-11-14T21:02:00-05:00 (Current date)
0000-01-01M00:00:46 = –1794-01-01T00:00:00-00:00 (Martian Year Zero, Jan 1, 1795 BCE)
2000-01-01M00:00:00 = +1967-08-28T00:27:07-04:00 (Mars Y2K)
2001-01-02M23:06:24 = +1969-07-16T13:32:00-00:00 (Apollo 11 Launch)
2001-01-07M03:07:27 = +1969-07-20T20:18:00-00:00 (Apollo 11 Landing)
2017-04-22M23:20:08 = +2000-01-01T00:00:00-00:00 (Earth Y2K (UTC))
2025-18-39M00:00:00 = +2016-07-20T19:21:26-04:00 (Leap day example)
2025-18-39M00:00:00 = +2016-07-20T19:21:27-04:00 (Leap conversion example)
