Chronography

Chronography (measurement of time) is different for virtually every civilized planet in the galaxy. In many cases, a single civilization on one planet may have a dozen ways to measure time. Due to the vast diversity of solar and local astronomical movements, calendar translation algorithms have become very well developed and widespread.

There have been no successful attempts to establish a universal (or even galactic) calendar. This is in part because of the obvious difficulty of transitioning entire systems to a new standard, but also largely in part to the fact that any standard system would have to be based off of the rotation of the galaxy or some widely observable and periodic phenomenon. This would be difficult to find and observe, as well as largely irrelevant to the timing of most dealings. As such, each planet/civilization has its own calendar/clock system that any visitors adjust to when on the planet, much as different parts of a planet have different time zones. There has, however, been a good deal more success in standardizing shorter increments of time. For instance, most spacefaring civilizations have agreed on a standard length of hours, minutes, an seconds. This is practical because few planets have a perfect integer number of hours in a day to begin with, so this is nothing new.

In interstellar space or intra-stellar travel, most travelers either stay on their own planet’s day/night schedule or on their destination planet’s. Many vessels of diverse crew keep the general vessel always in “day” mode, allowing members to go to their personal quarters for their preferred timing of “nights.” The term “spacelag” was coined soon after widespread interstellar travel to refer to the interplanetary equivalent of “jetlag,” and is a bit more intense as many species have a preferred day/night length built into their biology. However, thanks to artificial lighting, in many cases one need not adjust to new day lengths at all.