International Time now

A message sent by someone in the India Standard Time (IST) time region has the time region specified as "+0530" in the message header. However, "+0530" does not have to be in the Indian standard time, since other time zones could have the same setpoint.

In which time zones do they use the International Space Station?

The time on the ISS is relatively, but that does not prevent it from being bound to a time region on Earth. The International Space Station crew watch a sundown or a dawn every 45min. The new members arrived acclimatized to the Kazakh time after leaving the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Given so much room for chronic disorientation, it is no wonder that the ISS must be fixed at a uniform time.

Preferred area is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which corresponds to GMT.

Origins of the time zone

Prior to the emergence of the railway in the 18th century, all time was spent locally. At noon it was easy when the midday Sun was right above you, wherever you were, in the so call twilight time. During the early years of the railway, timetables were completely bewildering as they were predicated on sunshine.

Of course, it is not surprising that the man who was regarded as the standard time parent was a British railroad technician. 1878 Sir Sandford Fleming (1827-1915) invented the system of global time zone, which we still use today. His suggestion was to divide the globe into 24 time zone regions, each separated by fifteen degree (15º) of longitudes (like 24 segments of an orange).

The railway undertakings in the USA eventually began using Sir Fleming's default time zone on 18 November 1883. In 1884, an international prime meridian conference was convened in Washington, DC, to standardise time around the globe and to choose the prime merger or merger with the designation 0º from which all other meridians are taken (often called Greenwich Mean Time or GMT because the location they selected as the prime merger was Greenwich, England).

International Date Line, the fictive line in which travellers switch from one date to another, is situated at about 180º, exactly half way around the globe from Greenwich (conveniently crossed the Atlantic Ocean so no country is broken down into days). Until 1895, most states in the United States began to adhere to the time zone east, central, mountain and ocean, but the use of time zone did not become binding until Congress adopted the Standard Time Act of 1918.

The USA and its territory now comprise nine time zone areas. Once Alaska was divided into four of the eight US time zoned, but in 1983 the whole state, with the exception of the most western Aleuts, was unified in the sixth zoned, the Alaska time. Recently, changes in standardised time have attempted to take due note of the fact that the Earth's rotational velocity is decelerating very slowly.

1964 saw the introduction of a new time axis named co-ordinated all-purpose time ( "UTC"), which sometimes required the inclusion of an additional second - the second jump - to the length of the year. Whilst time zone are predicated on longitudes, some draw line to prevent inhabited areas or following boundaries, and some have added their own variation because they do not want to be split into multiple zone.

The time observed is not one of the 24 default time zones in some areas, as there are discrepancies between half-hour and quarter-hour. There are also discrepancies due to the fact that different counties or areas have introduced summer time. It is the biggest single time zoned economy in the world (it should include five).

It' like New York, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles are all in the same time slot. The Russian Federation keeps to its default time limits, except that the whole territory has summer time on a continuous basis, one fullhour before its actual time limits. Australasia uses three time zone; the east and west areas stick to the time allocated to them, but the centre area is half an hours ahead.

A number of Middle Eastern and South Asian nations also use half-hour time zone. When following a linear line westwards along 27 degrees parallel in South Asia, you move back and forth across time zones: from Pakistan UTC +5 hrs, India +5:30, Nepal +5:45, India (Sikkim) +5:30, China +8, Bhutan +6, India (Arunachal Pradesh) +5:30, Myanmar +6:30.

The largest time zone is Russia (11), followed by the USA with nine (six for states and three for territories) and Canada with six. In fact, you can be in three time zone at the same time, where the Norwegian/Finnish, Norwegian/Russian and Russian/Finnish border meets.