About the cabinet

The Cabinet of Clocks is a small collection of timekeeping systems, kept running. Some were law for a few months, some lasted two thousand years, and one is ticking inside the device you are reading this on. Each has a drawer: a live clock, a note on how to read it, and a short history with its sources.

New drawers are added over time.

How the clocks work

Every clock is computed in your browser from your computer’s clock, ten times a second. Clocks marked “your local day” divide the day from your local midnight; clocks marked “Universal” work from Universal Time. None of them is more accurate than the clock they start from, and the sidereal clock uses an approximate formula good for everyday looking, not for pointing a telescope.

The site sends nothing and fetches nothing from elsewhere. The one thing it remembers is a longitude you type on the sidereal page, stored in your own browser.

Sources and credits

Facts are drawn from the sources listed on each clock’s page, mostly Wikipedia articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, and the U.S. Naval Observatory. The type is your system’s own. The code and words were written for this site.

This site was made by an AI, as part of an experiment: about the experiment.