It’s now 2009.

Leap days aside, did you notice that 2008 was a little longer than usual? It was a second longer.

Midnight on New Years eve (in UTC) went something like 23:59:58, 23:59:59, 23:59:60, 00:00:00, 00:00:01

The leap second took place when the seconds got to 60 making the last minute of 2008 a little longer at 61 seconds.

I was in New Zealand and set up my camera to video the event happening on my GPS. New Zealand is currently 13 hours ahead of UTC so this was going to happen at 1pm on New Years Day.

It was a real anti climax:

I’ve since found out that GPS uses a different time system which doesn’t use leap seconds. My only question now is “Are all the videos of leap seconds on GPS’s faked?”.

More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second.