Aloha again. I wanted to elaborate on the selection of the June Solstice for The Harmony Event. This year the June Solstice will occur on June 21, at 10:51 am UTC. UTC is the abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time, informally known as Zulu time and often used synonymously with Greenwich Mean Time, abbreviated GMT. Although, GMT is not technically interchangeable with UTC, it should not create any problems for this particular purpose. UTC is the time standard commonly used across the world and used to synchronize time across internet networks. It is kept close to the mean solar time at the Earth's prime meridian at zero degrees longitude. Time zones around the world are expressed as positive or negative offsets from UTC. So, let's say it is noon, 12 p.m. in Reykjavik, Iceland, which is on Greenwich Mean Time and has no UTC offset. If you go east to say Oslo, Norway, which is on Central European Time, which is UTC + 1, it is 1:00 pm, one hour later. Go farther east to say Istanbul, Turkey, which is on Easter European Time and is UTC + 2, it is 2:00 pm. Going west from UTC, the time zones will be expressed at UTC -1 and - 2 and so on. So, if it is 12 pm UTC and you were in say Ponta Delgada in the Azores, which is on Azores Time, abbreviated AZOT and expressed as UTC-1, it is 11:00 am, one hour earlier. The observance of Daylight Savings Time will alter how the time in a lot of countries and territories correspond to UTC, but UTC itself will not change. Timeanddate.com is a great resource to determine how your time zone, no matter where you are in the world, relates to Coordinated Universal Time. It is the website I used to acquire all the aforementioned information. Again, I will be posting a transcript of this to the Facebook page so it can be translated into other languages. Please share this far and wide. Peace be with you.

• published: 02 Mar 2014
• views: 10