I'm currently in the process of getting part 2 in our open science series prepared, but wanted to drop a quick note saying happy leap second day! In just a few hours we will have our 26th leap second! The last minute of today (UTC) will have 61 seconds to make up for difference in our atomically derived time system and the imperfect system that is the Earth's rotation. The clock will read 11:59:59, 11:59:60, 12:00:00. Unusual eh? You can watch the leap second online at time.gov, spend your leap second watching a random one second video at spendyourleapsecondhere.com, or watch it nerd-style on your GPS NMEA feed.
If you want to know more about leap seconds and the wacky world of time keeping systems, I encourage you to listen to our episode on time-keeping on Don't Panic Geocast. We put a lot of time into researching that show and had a lot of fun learning about how complex time really is. Happy leap second day everyone!