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About

What is TimeNow?

TimeNow is an open-source REST API that provides true apparent solar time for any GPS coordinate on Earth. It was built to expose the systematic misalignment between civil clock time and actual solar position — and to give developers, researchers, and standards bodies the data infrastructure to reason about it.

The Problem It Solves

Since the 1884 International Meridian Conference, the world has used 24 fixed time zones based on railroad scheduling convenience. This creates structural misalignments between civil time and solar time that can exceed 3 hours.

TimeNow computes the honest answer to: "What time does the Sun say it is, right here?"

Project History

The project emerged from observing the EU DST reform deadlock of 2019–2026. The European Parliament voted to end seasonal clock changes, but no member state could agree on which permanent offset to adopt — because no tool existed to quantify the civil-solar cost of each option.

TimeNow builds that tool.

Standards Work

TimeNow has produced an IETF Internet-Draft proposing a solar IXDTF key under RFC 9557, which would allow UTC timestamps to carry solar position annotations:

2026-04-14T12:00:00Z[Europe/Madrid][solar/40.41,-3.70]

See IETF Internet-Draft →

License

TimeNow is released under the MIT License.

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2026 Ivan Kokalovic

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please:

  1. Fork the repository
  2. Create a feature branch: git checkout -b feat/my-feature
  3. Commit with a descriptive message
  4. Open a pull request against main

Areas that need help

  • New SDKs — Swift, Kotlin, Dart, C/C++, Elixir, and more (see SDK Overview)
  • IETF engagement — reviewing and improving the Internet-Draft
  • Research integrations — connecting with epidemiology / circadian science groups
  • Documentation — translations, examples, tutorials