Convert Sidereal Days to Seconds

Convert Sidereal Days (sid.d) to Seconds (s) instantly and accurately.

Conversion Formula

s = sid.d × 86164.0905

About Sidereal Days

A sidereal day = Earth's rotation period relative to the stars = 23 h 56 min 4.0905 s = 86,164.0905 s - ~3 min 56 s shorter than the 24 h solar day because Earth advances ~1° in its orbit each day. Equatorial telescope mounts rotate at one turn per sidereal day to track stars. VLBI, GPS orbit determination, and polar-motion monitoring use sidereal rotation as their reference. 1 sid. day = 86,164.0905 s.

About Seconds

The second (s) is the SI base unit of time, defined since 1967 as exactly 9,192,631,770 periods of the caesium-133 ground-state hyperfine transition at 0 K. Caesium fountain clocks realise this to ~10⁻¹⁶ (1 s lost per ~300 million years); optical lattice clocks (Sr, Yb) reach ~10⁻¹⁸. The second links to the metre via the defined speed of light c = 299,792,458 m/s exactly. 1 s = 1,000 ms = 1/60 min.

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