I've been interested in calendars and their histories for quite a while, but only recently discovered the Tranquility calendar, which is centered on the first moon landing. I thought it was a fun concept and found an equivalent to the *nix date command written by Scott M Harrison. Here's a perl port of his C implementation: Download tranquility.pl.

I've played with making this into a perl module that plugs into DateTime::Calendar, but I'm not sure whether to model it after the Gregorian or Hebrew modules. The frequency of leap years matches the Gregorian, but it has 13 months like the Hebrew. On the other hand, it has 1 or 2 null days per year, something that's apparently pretty unusual.

One thing I don't like about this calendar's center point is having the offset of time around the actual moment of touchdown so that it's in sync with GMT time. I think it would be more interesting if the touchdown moment was truly a zero point, maybe a "UTT" time zone.

And I think I'm getting UTC time in a non-recommended way at the moment, but it's a fun calendar, and the upcoming Aldrin Day just sounds much better than Leap Year.

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Armstrong Day 40 AT Update: I've released Mac OS X and iPhone/iPod Touch ports, Tranquility Date X and iTranquility. Click here to download.