Stardate 00000.0 began on July 5, 2318

[TrekGuide.com]

Until the last three seasons of Voyager, no episode had ever used an actual calendar date.

But the episode "HOMESTEAD" established that April was near the end of the Stardate year, as well as the TV season.

Based on dates given in actual episodes, the following conclusions can be reached:
1. The Voyager episode "HOMESTEAD" (Stardate 54868.6) must have taken place in April 2378, the 315th anniversary of first contact with Vulcans on April 5, 2063.
2. TNG episode "Data's Day" (Stardate 44390.1) took place on November 7, 2366, during the Hindu Festival of Lights.
3. Stardate 00000.0 began on July 5, 2318, 12:00 hours
4. The highest possible Stardate-to-year ratio is 918.23186 Stardates per year.

See this link for the full calculations based on FACTS FROM ACTUAL EPISODES:

TrekGuide.com/Stardates.htm#TNG

These facts conflict with conjecture in some books written before the final seasons of Voyager aired. But any calculations of Stardates must take these Voyager episodes into account, since they were the only shows ever to mention specific dates and Stardates in the same episode.

[Lee]

Also, another stardate that doesn't work is from "YEAR OF HELL" (the first part). Day 65 is on stardate 51268.4. It is said to be May 20, Janeway's birthday. According to your calculator, it would be August 30, 2373. Might be worth noting... going through all the "YEAR OF HELL" stardates and seeing if they match up.

[Lee]

Forgot to add that the YoH stardates can be found in the Delta Blues reviews at 3sygma.com/deltablues/yearofhell1.html and 3sygma.com/deltablues/yearofhell2.html

[Campion]

Are you absolutely sure about that? I'm gonna do some research on this.
Hopefully I can prove you wrong.

Eric

[TrekGuide.com]

OK, admittedly my Stardate Calculator is based on the assumption that there are exactly 1,000 Stardates per year.

I still need to go through all TNG and DS9 episodes in order to get more date references.

With more specific data points, maybe a new time ratio will work better than "1,000 Stardates per year."

I suspect, though, that there will be too many conflicting date references to make a completely comprehensive Stardate converter.

[elementelragehotmailcom]

ok so this is all well and good, but how do we calculate stardates for "now" is there ne way?

[A]

Guest-Lee said:

Also, another stardate that doesn't work is from "YEAR OF HELL" (the first part). Day 65 is on stardate 51268.4. It is said to be May 20, Janeway's birthday. According to your calculator, it would be August 30, 2373. Might be worth noting... going through all the "YEAR OF HELL" stardates and seeing if they match up.

TEXTMaybe some of the time incursions of the maniac of time made Janeway born earlyer TEXT

[Lee]

Found another stardate/time span reference, in "Pen Pals". 426895.3 to 42741.3. The episode has references to the Enterprise having been in the quadrant, and then a reference to Data having received the first transmission eight weeks earlier.

I've double checked the stardates, but every source online has them different. Anyone with a recording should double check all the stardates and between which stardates each other reference to how long is made.

[TrekGuide.com]

Guest-elementelragehotmailcom said:

ok so this is all well and good, but how do we calculate stardates for "now" is there ne way?

OK, due to popular demand, I have created a calculator to calculate the Stardate for "now" (or another recent date):

TrekGuide.com/Stardates.htm

Also, you can always find the official, current TrekGuide.com Stardate time in the blue bar at the top left corner of this page, or the yellow bar at the top of
TrekGuide.com

[John Collins]

TEXTI always wondered how that worked ;D

[Rob]

Can anyone tell me the date of Prixin? The only stardate given in "Mortal Coil" is before Prixin, but one stardate calculator places the episode in June of 2374 and another has it in November of 2373. Keep in mind that Prixin doesn't start on stardate 51449.2, but starts at least three days later.

[EAB]

I don't know if you've been following the development of Star Trek Online, but it's currently set in the early 25th century (2409, or about thirty years after Star Trek: Nemesis). Is there any chance you could make the TNG era calculator work for a few years into the 2400's as well as the 2300's? Say, up through 2415?

[SidVicious]

There is something interesting for your guide.

In the episode "Paradise Lost" (DS9), Benjamin Sisko clearly says that the blackout occured in the "night of the 23rd".

At the beginning of the episode, Sisko and Odo are talking about the Red Squad activities during the blackout. They read a transmission of that day, with the stardate 49334 clearly visible.

I entered the stardate in your computing sistem, and the result is:

Thu Sep 23 2371 20:36:31 GMT+0200

Sounds good

[Sai]

There is something interesting for your guide.

In the episode "Paradise Lost" (DS9), Benjamin Sisko clearly says

that the blackout occured in the "night of the 23rd".

At the beginning of the episode, Sisko and Odo are talking about the Red Squad activities during the blackout. They read a transmission of that day, with the stardate 49334 clearly visible.

I entered the stardate in your computing sistem, and the result is:

Thu Sep 23 2371 20:36:31 GMT+0200

Sounds good

Sounds good except for the little fact that Stardate 49334 should be the year 2372. The entire fourth year of DS9 occurs in 2372 as stated in the Star Trek Encyclopedia.

More importantly, according to the site requirement for Stardates:

a consistent Stardate system must incorporate the following dates:

Stardate 48315.6 must be in the year 2371 ("FUTURE'S END," "CARETAKER").

Stardate 48579.4 must be in the year 2371 ("EYE OF THE NEEDLE").

Stardate 48975.1 must be in the year 2371 ("THE 37's").

If you enter the above Stardates into the "The Next Generation Calendar Date Calculator" ... 48975.1 displays as 2371, however ... 48579.4 and 48315.6 displays as 2370. The calculator failed two Stardate requirements.

I also find it odd that the site assumes the following for TNG and later Stardates:

Around May 25 (00:00) is when the two Most Significant Digits rolls over ... for example, from 40 to 41

xx606.0 is about Dec 31 (23:35) and will roll over to Jan 1 come xx606.1

Because of this ... any Stardates below xx606 will be in one year while any Stardates above xx606 will be the following year. That is why 48315.6 and 48579.4 is in 2370 while 48975.1 is in 2371.

It appears that you are assuming an in-universe Star Trek year begins on May 25 and ends on May 24 of the following year. That may be true (season airdate-wise), but what does season airdates have to do with the Star Trek in-universe dates??

Isn't it more logical to have 000 - 999 correspond to Jan 1 - Dec 31 for any given year??

According to The Next Generation Technical Manual, the Enterprise-D was launched on Oct. 4, 2363 with a Stardate of 40759.5. Entering Oct. 4, 2363 into your calculator yields Stardate 41363??

[yesyouam]

That's a nifty calculator, but it was driving me nuts that it pulls my system time (which is EST) and calculates the stardate as if my system time was UTC.
I toyed around with the javascript, got frustrated with it and ended up making one with bash, where I'm more comfortable.

So, I've been giving this some thought.
I like the idea that a year is chopped into 1000 stardates.
This is what I read on this site that hung me up:

"Fact: An average Earth year comprises about 365.2422 mean solar days."

Yeah, a mean tropical year is about 365.24219 days.
Divide that by a thousand and a stardate is about 31556.925 seconds long.
But four centuries from now, a mean tropical year will be a couple seconds longer, making a stardate more like 31556.927 seconds long. (or is it the other way around?)
Well, actually the years will contain _more_ seconds, but less days.
Days gain seconds and years lose days, hence leap seconds.
Yeah, a thousandth of a second every couple hundred years isn't a really big deal, but it got me thinking...

That's all kind of irrelevant.
If you're going to calculate a stardate to synch up with actual broadcast dates, you don't want to use a mean tropical year.
That's not what we set our clocks to.
We use the Gregorian calendar.
When you average out the 400-year cycle of the Gregorian calendar, a year is 365.2425 days long
That gives you a 31556.952-second stardate.
This also means that the stardate is never going to quite line up with a specific time and date, unless you wait 400 years.

So, when I first saw Picard spouting off a stardate, it was about 8 PM EDT, which was midnight UTC.
So, Tue Sep 29 00:00:00 UTC 1987 equals stardate 41153.7.
I realize that there have been 11 leap seconds since the premiere of TNG, but Unix time ignores leap seconds.
So, if you think about it, a Unix second is a wee bit longer than an SI second.
Anyway, they only give the stardate to one decimal point, so I really only want an accuracy of, well... a 52- or 53-minute window.

Anyways,
Here's the script:

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

# stardate.sh by yesyouam

# This is the stardate system I developed.
# It's based on two things:
# 1) A stardate is 31556.952 seconds long.
# 2) Stardate 41153.7 was at Tue Sep 29 00:00:00 UTC 1987.

utcsecs=`date -u +"%s"`
stardate=$(bc << EOF
scale = 1
(($utcsecs - 559872000) / 31556.952) + 41153.7
EOF
)
echo "STARDATE: "$stardate

Right now, my script says it's 63419.0 and this site says it's 63473.1.

[TrekGuide.com]

Yes, my Stardate Calculator is far from perfect, and it does not match up perfectly to all date references in all "Star Trek" episodes -- but then most "Star Trek" episodes for the past 40 years have just been making up arbitrary Stardates, so it's amazing that many dates are as close and consistent as they are.

That being said, we have to acknowledge the difference between a time and an event.

A measure of time is constant throughout the universe. One second on your atomic clock is still one second on Earth or Vulcan or Mars or in another galaxy (aside from any irregularities caused by gravitational or Relativistic acceleration). Constant units of time include seconds, minutes, and hours.

An event, however, does not have a constant measure of time. Events, such as days, years, centuries, birthday parties, human lifespans, etc., can vary in duration from person to person, or planet to planet. A day on Earth is not the same as a day on Vulcan or Mars. These event names, like "years," describe the arbitrary span when some natural occurance takes place, without regard to a constant measure of time, such as seconds.

In order to be useful to all users on all planets in the Federation, Stardates must be based on units of constant time (e.g., seconds, minutes, and hours), which are constant throughout the Galaxy. Stardates cannot be based on an Earth day or year, because those are events whose duration constantly and arbitrarily changes.

Plus, what if Earth or its Sun exploded. Then how would people on Vulcan measure Stardates if they were based on Earth years or days? The words "year" and "day" have no meaning if there is no Earth and Sun.

Therefore, the definition of a standard Stardate must be some multiple of a constant unit of time, such as seconds, not an arbitrary astronomic event like days or years, which have no constant, defined length.

I am open to suggestions as to what arbitrary unit of time would be most useful throughout the Federation. I chose the number of seconds in a mean solar year to equal 1,000 Stardates, which of course almost never coincides with the actual length of a year on Earth or any other planet, but is close enough for the next few centuries, so that the rollover in Stardates usually falls within the same couple days on Earth, depending on leap years. (Having Stardate leap years, or leap seconds, would make no sense on Vulcan or any other planet. Why should every planet in the Federation have to add leap-Stardates to their clock every year just to keep Stardate time on Earth aligned with its orbital variations?)

So, my point is that, while 1,000 Stardates roughly coincide with an average Earth year, the event known as a "year" has nothing to do with the definition of a Stardate. Stardates must be defined by a constant unit of time, such as seconds.

[pengraff]

A very thought provoking subject with some interesting points of view.

The situation is analogous to the story behind the standardization of the SI unit of length called the meter. Originally, the meter was defined as one ten-millionth the distance from the Equator to the North Pole along the Paris, France Meridian. As time passed and the need for accuracy increased it was re-defined as the distance traveled by light in 1/299,792,458th of a second. My point here is that, within the Star Trek Universe, there are many examples of the use of the meter and kilometer. If the Federation had created a new definition of length based on that greatest constant of all – the speed of light – there is no evidence of it in canon.

The story behind the standardization of another SI unit known as the 'second' is similar. Originally defined as 1/86400th of the average time required for the earth to complete one rotation about its axis, the second has since been redefined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. (From Wikipedia)

The Star Trek Universe is not necessarily the same as our universe, but defining length in terms of the speed of light seems a likely discovery. And, although they may not have used radiation from the cesium atom, some other atom would have been used so the second would have likely been defined very closely to ours.

My point here it would have been easy for the Federation of the 24th century to adopt a time standard that no longer depends on the planet earth, since we were able to do it in the 20th century. Federation members would be free to continue to use whatever colloquial unit they wanted but, whenever it was necessary to use a common unit, and with Federation headquarters located in Paris, it seems very likely that the Federation’s second would be either the same as our second, or close enough that it would have little effect upon calendars in the next thousand or more years.

Likewise, and again because the Federation has its headquarters in Paris, France, it’s likely that they would be in the best position to choose when Stardate zero begins. This is one of those situations where every member might have a different opinion, but since the Federation would also be the agency responsible for the choices they make, the decision would lean slightly in favor of the Federation choosing whatever start date was convenient to them. Given that freedom I think the Federation would have chosen January 1st and I think we would all agree that would happen in year 2323. So, Stardate 00000 would be January 1st, 2323. They might also choose a time of day that is convenient to them too, and it would not have to be midnight.

A much smarter man that I about such things, Mr. Graham Kennedy, a physics teacher from England, developed a Stardate / Gregorian calendar converter which can be found at www.ditl.org/ (Select Calculator, then Stardate Calculator. Use your Tab key to advance between fields.)

Graham’s calculator, good for all Stardates between 0 and 97676999, computes Stardate 00000 as January 1st, 2323 at 7:00 am. From the tests I’ve performed on it, it continues to behave properly during all leap years between 2324 and the 99998 including the more complex ones such as 2400, 2800, 3000, etc.

I hope this contributes to the discussion. I know all interested Trek fans would prefer to resolve this matter finally, if that is even possible!

[TheTrekhippy]

It is not possible, since it is an idea of a writer who is lost to us now. I feel there are a very few people left whom I would trust to know what that writer might say to define stardates, if he chose to do so. However, he was asked once and he said something along the lines of it was just something he made up on the spur of the moment and there was no real definition or calculations to it. Also, one must keep in mind that besides the myriad of planets with their differing lengths of day and year, there are the multiple timelines. Voyager "Year of Hell" was all a messed up timeline. Q's have been manipulating time and space for years. Then there are multiple spatial anomolies that have been written in to affect the timeline.

[Shlay Robots]

Hey, I made this video about Seven of Nine / Voyager / Obama and it is all true. Please watch it! Thanks

www.youtube.com/user/ShlayRobots?feature=mhum#p/a/u/1/MrZiEYew9nA

[Starglass]

Ok, I love the sd calculators on this site. My only problem is that I can't use them to calculate for TOS. Does anyone know of a calculator that will work with times between 2265 and 2320?

[Nike]

I just noticed that the stardate is about to roll over.

Actually, the reason I'm here is that I was playing STO and I realized that their stardates rolled over on May 25 or so to 90000. I thought I remembered that was the epoch used on this site, but when I looked, it said July 5. The other details were also different. I guess that the formula got changed.

I figured out that STO stardates use the old TrekGuide formula, but exactly 400 years from the present. I.e., when it's July 15, 2012, they show the stardate for July 15, 2412. That's because when the game was written in 2009 they set the in-game year to 2409. (It was released to the public early in 2010.)

Since Voyager has had no new episodes for 11 years, the contemporary stardate calculator here no longer has a practical use. It makes more sense now to use STO stardates. It's too bad that TrekGuide changed its TNG calculator, as it would have been useful to convert STO stardates.

One difference between STO stardates and TrekGuide's contemporary stardates is that STO is based on Universal Time (GMT) and TrekGuide is based on the computer's local time zone, so it changes depending on where the user is, so when it's 66000.0 here, it's 66001.7 for my sister, which does not seem to be very trekish. We're on the same planet, after all.

[Nike]

I just found out that DS9:Second Sight started the day after the fourth anniversary of Wolf 359, which occurred around 44000. Since the episode was on stardate 47329.4, that comes out to about 832 stardates per year.

Just sayin'.

Personal Log, Stardate 47329.4. I finally realize why I've had trouble sleeping the last few nights. Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of the massacre at Wolf three five nine... the fourth anniversary of Jennifer's death.

[startreksparta]

Were Star Dates reset when the new movie was released?




Kevin Jackal Johnston
www.StarTrekSparta.com

[Nike]

Oct 14, 2012 21:41:03 GMT -5 startreksparta said:

Were Star Dates reset when the new movie was released?

The 2009 and 2013 movies just use calendar dates, i.e. the year and day-of-year. For instance, Star Trek Into Darkness has a stardate 2259.55, which is the 55th day of 2259, or the 24th of February.

Kinda takes the fun outa it.

Nike's Log
Stardate 66499.4, or 2013.12

[Jeff Nyman]

The page says "the latest known TNG Stardate in STAR TREK: NEMESIS, whose given Stardate of 56844.9 would be around March 29, 2379" ... however when I calculate 56844.9 in the calculator the day it comes back with is:

Sat May 31 2380 12:24:44 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

[JSoltNYC]

In regards to your 24th Century Stardate Calculator, I believe I may have found "evidence" in favor of option 2, namely that 1 day=0.397766856 SD.

The DS9 episode "In the Pale Moonlight" takes place on SD 51721.3, that is 3147.3 SD before "Homestead", which is dated April 6, 2378.

Using option 1 of your calculator (1 day=0.39814859 SD) means that SD 51721.3 = Thursday, October 31, 2374.
Using option 2 of your calculator (1 day=0.397766856 SD) means that SD 51721.3 = Saturday, November 2, 2374.

In the episode, though, Sisko clearly states that: "every Friday morning, for the past three months, I've posted the official list of Starfleet personnel killed..." The last flashback scene of that episode takes place as everyone is reviewing a new casualty list, so it must be a Friday morning. Therefore, the SD/day ratio of option 1 has to be eliminated, as it yields a day occurring on a Thursday.

Option 2, yielding a Saturday date, gives enough time for the events of the last flashback to happen (e.g., Sisko walloping Garak, the Romulans investigating the assassination of their senator, etc.) before we return to the present, which is Sisko's log entry on SD 51721.3, where he says "At oh-eight-hundred hours, station time... the Romulan Empire formally declared war against the Dominion." It sounds reasonable to conclude that this declaration of war occurred on Saturday morning, the day after the explosion.

Granted, I'm ignoring the fact that when he says "station time", he means Bajoran time, with a longer day (yet shorter year) than ours. But at the same time, Sisko's continual reference to "Friday" suggests a correlation with Earth timekeeping. And it's remarkable that Option 2 calculates the day so in sync with what the episode shows!

[Guest]

From one of the TNG Writer’s/Director’s Guides: “The digit following the decimal point counts tenths of a day. Stardate 45254.4, therefore, represents the noon hour on the 254th "day" of the fifth season.”

memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Stardate#The_Next_Generation_era

[SANSd20]

Do we know how Discovery handles it's stardates?