[LINK] "A Calendar for Ceres"

[rfmcdonald]

Long-time readers will be aware of my boosterism for 1 Ceres, a dwarf planet of largely rocky composition located in the asteroid belt--I even have a dedicated Ceres tag. With its likely abundant water, carbonaceous, and metal resources, if there is space colonization Ceres is as likely a target as any, perhaps even as much as Mars. The question of a local calendar may well come up--Robert Zubrin has devised one for Mars. Now, Andrew Barton has come up with a calendar for Ceres.

Once humans go into space to stay, the Gregorian calendar isn't something they'll necessarily take with them. A timekeeping system based around equinox and solstice and organized for the needs of an agricultural society may not have much more than nostalgic value to the pioneers of Sol, considering that the environments they inhabit will be purely artificial. Depending on the tempo with which space is settled, humanity's new worlds may well ditch Earth's dating system in favor of one which is relevant to them, and not just an apron string binding them across the light-hours to a land that's no longer home.

[. . .]

Ceres' orbital period is a little over four and a half Earth years - 1680.5 days, and the Cererean calendar divides this out into 1,680 twenty-four hour days with a bit left over at the end. The days are grouped into twenty-one months, each eighty days long, and owing to my vision of Ceres as being run along technocratic lines, they are for the most part named after scientists, astronomers, and people relevant to the discovery of Ceres.

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