Times and timestamps#

See also

GPS time#

All gravitational-wave data are recorded with timestamps in the GPS time system (recording the absolute number of seconds since the start of the GPS epoch at midnight on January 6th 1980).

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration stores such GPS times with nanosecond precision using the LIGOTimeGPS object.

Time conversions#

Astropy provides the excellent Time object to allow easy conversion between this format and a number of other formats. For convenience, this object is available in GWpy as gwpy.time.Time.

On top of that, GWpy provides three simple methods to simplify converting between GPS times and Python-standard datetime objects, namely:

tconvert

Convert GPS times to ISO-format date-times and vice-versa.

to_gps

Convert any input date/time into a LIGOTimeGPS.

from_gps

Convert a GPS time into a datetime.datetime.