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Sidereal time vs solar time. Above left, a distant star (the small red circle) and the Sun are at culmination, on the local meridian. Centre: only the distant star is at culmination (a mean sidereal day). Right: few minutes later the Sun is on the local meridian again. A solar day is complete

Sidereal time is time measured by the apparent diurnal motion of the vernal equinox, which is very close to, but not identical with, the motion of stars. They differ by the precession of the vernal equinox relative to the stars.

Solar time is measured by the apparent diurnal motion of the sun, and local noon in solar time is defined as the moment when the sun is at its highest point in the sky (exactly due south in the northern hemisphere and due north in the southern hemisphere). The average time taken for the sun to return to its highest point is 24 hours.

However, the stars appear to move in a slightly different way. During the course of one day, the earth has moved a short distance along its orbit around the sun, and so must rotate a small extra angular distance before the sun reaches its highest point. The stars, however, are so far away that the earth's movement along its orbit makes a generally negligible difference to their apparent direction (see, however parallax), and so they return to their highest point in slightly less than 24 hours. A mean sidereal day is about 23h 56m 4.1s in length. However, due to variations in the rotation rate of the Earth the rate of an ideal sidereal clock deviates from any simple multiple of a civil clock. In practice, the difference is kept track of by the difference UTC–UT1, which is measured by radio telescopes and kept on file and available to the public at the IERS and at the United States Naval Observatory.

Sidereal time is defined as the hour angle of the vernal equinox. When the meridian of the vernal equinox is directly overhead, local sidereal time is 00:00. Greenwich Sidereal time is the hour angle of the vernal equinox at the prime meridian at Greenwich, England; local values differ according to longitude. When one moves eastward 15° in longitude, sidereal time is larger by one hour (note that it wraps around at 24 hours). Unlike computing local solar time, differences are counted to the accuracy of measurement, not just in whole hours. Greenwich sidereal time and UT1 differ from each other by a constant rate (1.00273790935). Sidereal time is used at astronomical observatories because sidereal time makes it very easy to work out which astronomical objects will be observable at a given time. Objects are located in the night sky using right ascension and declination relative to the celestial equator (analogous to longitude and latitude on Earth), and when sidereal time is equal to an object's right ascension, the object will be at its highest point in the sky, or culmination, at which time it is best placed for observation, as atmospheric extinction is minimised.

• Coordinated Universal Time
• International Atomic Time
• Terrestrial Time
• Time

• Web based Sidereal time calculator
• For more details, see the article on sidereal time from Jason Harris' Astroinfo, which comes along with KStars, a Desktop Planetarium for Linux/KDE.
• See also KStars website.
• SolarClock, open source, freeware application to convert between gregorian/julian date and to/from sidereal time.