A Martian day is 24 hours and 37 minutes long. Is there any way to do days that are fractions of hours in Aeon? I’ve got this manually set in a physical calendar, but it would be very helpful to be able to adjust my timeline for Mars.
I see you described your problem in more detail in another thread (multiple calendars). When it comes to jumping back and forth between Mars and Earth, redefining the day won’t help you anyway. It is better to do it like the NASA and define the “Sol” to 24 hours of 60 minutes and 60 seconds each. I think NASA does it that way for a good reason, so that they can also use normal clocks, which only go at different speed.
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/mars24/help/notes.html
Since there seems to be no way of displaying multiple calendars at different scaling with Aeon Timeline, I would use one reference timeline, and mark the days of the other planet as suggested elsewhere here in the forum, e.g. for the related problem of lunar cycles:
I just checked: At least on the iPhone version, when you create a custom calendar you can choose how many hours a day has, but you have to enter whole numbers, no fractions or additional minutes allowed.
(By the way, as a long time Writing Excuses listener I‘m awed to meet you here.)
But then of course, if you create a project based on a custom calendar, that won’t be tied to “our” calendar anyway.
You need something that shows earth dates and hours parallel (otherwise you could just define that an hour on mars is the 24th of a mars day).
I was thinking of creating repeating events that are each 24 h and 37 minutes long which could help keep track of mars days.
But to my suprise there doesn’t seem to be a way to create repeating events in Aeon?? I thought I new the app pretty well, but right now I’m confused. Shouldn’t there be a functionality to enter repeating dates like in a calendar app? Am I just not finding it?
No, there currently isn’t a way to enter repeating events on a timeline. You can have repeating Calendar Markers, but not actual events.
Could a calendar marker be set to repeat ever 24 h and 37 min?
Yes it can. When you create a calendar marker, you can tick the “Repeat” box to have it repeat, and then choose the time you want it to repeat. However the time it uses is the smallest precision, so to have it repeat every 24 hours, 37 mins you would have to set it at 1477 minutes (24*60 + 37).
So this would give Mary Robinette at least a marker to see where new mars days begin, even though it won’t be a dedicated mars calendar.