the year AD 36 in the Julian calendar, or a duration of 36 astronomical Julian years). This is why the terms "ordinal date" or "day-of-year" are preferred. In contexts where a "Julian date" means simply an ordinal date, calendars of a Gregorian year with formatting for ordinal dates are often called "Julian calendars", but this could also mean that the calendars are of years in the Julian calendar system. Historically, Julian dates were recorded relative to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) (later, Ephemeris Time), but since 1997 the International Astronomical Union has recommended that Julian dates be specified in Terrestrial Time. Seidelmann indicates that Julian dates may be used with International Atomic Time (TAI), Terrestrial Time (TT), Barycentric Coordinate Time (TCB), or Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and that the scale should be indicated when the difference is significant. The fraction of the day is found by converting the number of hours, minutes, and seconds after noon into the equivalent decimal fraction. Time intervals calculated from differences of Julian Dates specified in non-uniform time scales, such as UTC, may need to be corrected for changes in time scales (e.g. leap seconds). Variants Because the starting point or reference epoch is so long ago, numbers in the Julian day can be quite large and cumbersome. A more recent starting point is sometimes used, for instance by dropping the leading digits, in order to fit into limited computer memory with an adequate amount of precision. In the following table, times are given in 24-hour notation. In the table below, Epoch refers to the point in time used to set the origin (usually zero, but (1) where explicitly indicated) of the alternative convention being discussed in that row. The date given is a Gregorian calendar date unless otherwise specified. JD stands for Julian Date. 0h is 00:00 midnight, 12h is 12:00 noon, UT unless otherwise specified. Current value is as of and may be cached. [] The Modified Julian Date (MJD) was introduced by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in 1957 to record the orbit of Sputnik via an IBM 704 (36-bit machine) and using only 18 bits until August 7, 2576. MJD is the epoch of VAX/VMS and its successor OpenVMS, using 63-bit date/time, which allows times to be stored up to July 31, 31086, 02:48:05.47. The MJD has a starting point of midnight on November 17, 1858, and is computed by MJD = JD