lox-time defines an API for working with instants in astronomical time scales.

Overview

lox_time exposes:

• the marker trait [TimeScale] and zero-sized implementations representing the most common, continuous astronomical time scales;
• the concrete type [Time] representing an instant in a [TimeScale];
• [Utc], the only discontinuous time representation supported by Lox;
• the [TryToScale] and [ToScale] traits, supporting transformations between pairs of time scales;
• standard implementations of the most common time scale transformations.

Continuous vs discontinuous timescales

Internally, Lox uses only continuous time scales (i.e. time scales without leap seconds). An instance of [Time] represents an instant in time generic over a continuous [TimeScale].

[Utc] is used strictly as an I/O time format, which must be transformed into a continuous time scale before use in the wider Lox ecosystem.

This separation minimises the complexity in working with leap seconds, confining these transformations to the crate boundaries.