Seconds to Baktuns (s to baktun)
1 second equals 8.03755144×10⁻¹¹ baktuns (rounded).
How to convert seconds to baktuns
To convert seconds to baktuns, multiply the number of seconds by 8.03755144×10⁻¹¹. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply baktuns by 12,441,600,000.
baktuns = seconds × 8.03755144×10⁻¹¹
Example: 10 seconds = 8.03755144×10⁻¹⁰ baktuns.
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
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
Baktun (baktun)
20 katuns or 144,000 days (about 394 years). The Long Count completed 13 baktuns on 21 December 2012, a date misread as a doomsday prediction.
The largest unit in everyday Long Count use, the baktun spans 20 katuns, or 144,000 days, about 394.26 tropical years. Dates are written with the baktun count first, so a monument reading 9.15.10.0.0 sits in the ninth baktun, and the Classic period of Maya civilization fell mainly in the eighth and ninth.
Public attention came when the count reached 13.0.0.0.0 on 21 December 2012, under the widely used GMT correlation. Popular writers called it the end of the world, but scholars note there is no evidence the Maya expected that, and the count simply moved on to 14.0.0.0.0. The next such milestone falls in March 2407.
A naming quirk follows from the numbering. The Long Count starts counting from zero, so the baktun that began in 2012 is strictly the fourteenth, though it is usually called the thirteenth. J. Eric S. Thompson judged that usage inaccurate but too entrenched to change. Larger cycles such as the piktun, at 20 baktuns, are rarely attested, and their names are modern coinages.
1 baktun = 12,441,600,000 seconds (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Baktun; Wikipedia: Mesoamerican Long Count calendar; Wikipedia: Maya calendar
Related conversions
- Baktuns to seconds (reverse)
- Seconds to minutes
- Seconds to hours
- Seconds to days
- Seconds to weeks
- Seconds to months
- Seconds to years
- Seconds to milliseconds
- Seconds to microseconds
- Seconds to nanoseconds
- Seconds to decades
- Seconds to centuries
- Seconds to millennia
- Minutes to baktuns
- Hours to baktuns
- Days to baktuns
- Weeks to baktuns
- Months to baktuns
- Years to baktuns
See all time units.