Katuns to Seconds (katun to s)
1 katun equals 622,080,000 seconds exactly.
How to convert katuns to seconds
To convert katuns to seconds, multiply the number of katuns by 622,080,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply seconds by 1.607510288×10⁻⁹ (rounded).
seconds = katuns × 622,080,000
Example: 10 katuns = 6,220,800,000 seconds.
Months and years are not constant. This site uses the average Gregorian year of 365.2425 days, so one 'year' converts to 365.2425 days, not 365; use 'common year' for exactly 365 days.
About these units
Katun (katun)
20 tuns or 7,200 days (about 19.7 years).
Twenty tuns, or 7,200 days, add up to a katun, which Wikipedia converts to 19.713 tropical years. That is why the unit is described as roughly twenty years, although it falls about three and a half months short of that.
Katuns carried real social weight. Rulers who lived to see four or five of them could take the title of a 4-katun or 5-katun ruler, a kind of age honorific. The end of a katun was marked by ceremonies, and at Tikal large twin pyramid complexes were built to host them. Each katun was also thought to carry its own set of prophecies and associations.
After the Long Count fell out of use in the Postclassic period, the Maya still tracked katuns by the Calendar Round date on which each began, a system known as the Short Count. In the Long Count the katun is the second digit from the left of a typical date, running 0 to 19 before it rolls into the next baktun. The figure of 622,080,000 seconds used here follows from the 7,200 day count.
1 katun = 622,080,000 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Kʼatun; Wikipedia: Maya calendar; Steve Morse: Mayan Calendar Rules
Second (s)
The SI base unit of time, defined by the radiation frequency of the cesium-133 atom: 9,192,631,770 cycles per second.
Our word second is a leftover of Latin. Medieval scholars divided a degree, and later the hour, into 60 parts called pars minuta prima, the first small part, and divided those again into pars minuta secunda, the second small part. NIST traces the roots further back: Babylonian and Greek astronomers split the circle into 360 degrees, and around 150 C.E. Ptolemy split each degree into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds. Clocks that could show seconds appeared only in the later 16th century, and Christiaan Huygens's pendulum clock of 1656 was the first able to keep time accurately to the second.
For most of history the second was a fraction of a day, and in 1956 it was redefined as a fraction of the tropical year, a definition the SI took over in 1960. In 1967 the 13th CGPM switched to atoms: 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation tied to a hyperfine transition of caesium-133. The 2019 SI revision restated this by fixing the caesium frequency at 9,192,631,770 hertz. NIST reports that commercial caesium clocks stay within about a three-millionth of a second per year, and experimental clocks based on other atoms are roughly ten thousand times more precise.
The second is the reference unit for time on this site.
Sources: NIST: the second and the SI redefinition; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition; Wikipedia: Second
Related conversions
- Seconds to katuns (reverse)
- Katuns to minutes
- Katuns to hours
- Katuns to days
- Katuns to weeks
- Katuns to months
- Katuns to years
- Minutes to seconds
- Hours to seconds
- Days to seconds
- Weeks to seconds
- Months to seconds
- Years to seconds
- Milliseconds to seconds
- Microseconds to seconds
- Nanoseconds to seconds
- Decades to seconds
- Centuries to seconds
- Millennia to seconds
See all time units.