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Galactic GPS and Calendar

Date: 2014-02-25
Tags: space gps calendar time

I’m a layman when it comes to astronomy, and would greatly appreciate feedback from anyone “in the know”. These are just some things going through my head earlier.

I grabbed a pulsar database earlier today because I was bored.

If a ship could see a handful of the pulsars, with a minimum of 3, the
angle between the ship and each pulsar should be fairly unique for any
given place in space (within sensor limits).

Looking at some of the periods (/psrcat -db_file psrcat.db -c "P0" | tail -n +4 | head -n -1 | awk '{print int(\$2 * 1000)}' | sort -n |uniq) and was thinking that the least-common-multiple of many pulsars could be a handful of millennia at the least. This may prove to be useful as a long-term (by human standards) calendar.