Nautical time

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Nautical time is a maritime time standard established in the 1920s to allow ships on high seas to coordinate their local time with other ships, consistent with a long nautical tradition of accurate celestial navigation. Nautical time divides the globe into 24 nautical time zones with hourly clock offsets, spaced at 15 degrees by longitudinal coordinate, with no political deviation.

Nautical timekeeping dates back to the early 20th century as a standard way to keep time at sea, although it largely only applied to military fleets pre–World War 2. This time-keeping method is only used for radio communications and to account for slight inaccuracies that using Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) may lead to during navigation of the high seas. It is typically only used for trans-oceanic travel, as captains will often not change the timekeeping for short distances such as channels or inland seas.^[1]