Lunar date() function for PHP

What is the time on the Moon?

A few guys leading a project called LunarClock.org designed a Lunar date and time system, the Lunar Standard Time (LST).

It is a really simple method of the time tracking on the Moon (theoretically of course, as no one lives there – yet 😉). It based on the good old scheme of the “Earth time”: it has seconds, minutes, hours, cycles, days and years. The only unfamiliar thing is the cycles thing between the hours and days (and the lack of the months). It is necessary in case we stick to the definition of the day: the time between two noons. On the moon it is a really long period, it lasts for about 29.53 days on Earth! It would be a bit strange to say “it is half past 143”, so they introduced the cycles. And because the days are so long, 365.25 (or so) of them would be… a lot of days on Earth, therefore the months are dismissed and the Lunar years are simply 12 Lunar days long – about 354.36 Earth days. This is so close to our 365.25 days per year!

Another interesting thing is the days on Moon have names just as our months. They named the twelve days after the twelve men who walked on the Moon during the Apollo missions. I think this is a nice idea.

Well okay, enough of the chit-chat, here is a demo of the PHP class I mentioned in the title:

The current time on the Moon is __current_lunar_date_here__.

So this is the current time on the Moon, so far from here, so great differences between the days, but still very familiar.

Great job guys from LunarClock.org, I like LST!

You can download the PHP function (which can be used almost exactly as the original date() function) from here: http://dev.kakaopor.hu/stuffs/lunar_date.php.txt (can be freely used/redistributed/modified/etc. of course)
For more about the LST, Lunar Standard Time, see: http://lunarclock.org/