Travel Duration Calculator -
Beta Release

Ever wonder how much longer a stop-over in London will be compared to a direct flight to Hong Kong from New York? Or what time it will be in New York when you arrive in Hong Kong? The beta release of our newest service, the Travel Duration Calculator can now calculate the total traveling time it takes to go from one city to another anywhere around the world.

Simply enter the departure and arrival city, as well as the date and time of departure and arrival. You can add up to six (6) transfer cities into your itinerary by clicking on “Add transfer city” and filling in the transfer location, the time of departure and the time of arrival from the transfer city. When you have entered in your travel itinerary, simply click the “Calculate” button.

Your travel itinerary will appear with the estimated total traveling time between your departure and arrival location, the number of hours your clock changes, as well as a map showing the path of your trip. A table will display the local times for each location at every stage of your journey.

Now you can easily compare travel times, get the latest time zone information for your departure and arrival cities and more with the Travel Duration Calculator.

It is important to note that this is the beta release of this service, so there might be some issues that still need to be resolved. We welcome any feedback that can help improve this service.

Updated Time Zone Abbreviation Page

Depending on where you are in the world, it's a good idea to become familiar with time zone names and abbreviations since most of them are commonly used to identify a time zone rather than using its offset with respect to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Our updated time zone abbreviations page now includes more regions, time zone names and abbreviations that are commonly used around the world. The list of time zone acronyms and abbreviations are alphabetically sorted and has more information on each time zone such as daylight saving time (DST) information, its UTC offset, as well as example locations that are in the designated time zone.

It is important to note that some of the abbreviations are not unique and some may have several entries in the list. Other time zones have many common names that will be listed as well.

Photo of the Month

This month’s Photo of the Month features a sundial in Nice, France that was submitted by a reader who wishes to remain anonymous.

Do you have a great picture from a past eclipse or a unique way of tracking time? Submit your personal pictures of eclipses, clouds, or anything related to time and date to be published on our next newsletter . Send pictures to webmaster@timeanddate.com and read our Disclaimer for more information.

Monthly Poll

September Poll

Previous Poll Results

You can view the previous poll results online for last month's poll question "Which mobile platform would you like to have a timeanddate.com service available as an application?".

All the Time in the World

by Allan Eastman

"The Time Traveler's Life - Part One"

Allan Eastman left behind his successful career as a Film and Television Director and Executive Producer to travel the world. He has visited over 100 countries on all six continents. He spends most of his time reading, writing and thinking about things. He is an amateur historian, a music archivist, a reasonable chef and a seeker after happiness .

When Would You Go?

At a certain point in their lives, I bet that everybody has a fantasy about traveling in Time.

On the simplest level, maybe it is only a desire to go back and visit with a dear departed loved one or perhaps to travel into the future to see how your kids turn out and what their families are like.
Or to try to fix some emotional or social disaster that has been haunting you ever since it happened.

A lot of people would think it a good thing to travel back in Time to rid History of any number of murderous Tyrants before they got a chance to set off on their genocidal careers. Many others would love to be able to personally witness the passion of the Christ or sit at the feet of the Buddha or join up with Mohammad’s hejira. Or maybe, just be a Time Tourist – stroll the marble piazzas of Augustan Rome in its prime, or lounge on pristine Copacabana Beach before the people and the ugly buildings arrived, or stand in the pit of the Globe Theatre to watch Will Shakespeare act in the first production of Hamlet.

Do you wish to witness Lady Godiva’s ride? Check out the Beatles in the Cavern Club? Fight alongside Davy Crockett at the Alamo? Where you might go is all just a matter of personal interest. But is Time Travel possible?

Well, yes. And, no. Sort of.

In fact, every one of us is a Time Traveler, of course. From the moment we arrive squealing into the world, we travel forward in Time as we learn to perceive it. We are born, we spend a certain amount of duration growing, loving, surviving, prospering, suffering - being alive. Sooner or later, our bodies fail. The dates inscribed on our tombstone write our own personal Time Travel story.

OK well, that’s a start but it’s not what most of us think of when we consider Time Travel, right? We want to get into a machine, adjust a read out, push a button and go. We want that DeLorean with the Flux Capacitor technology so that we can just zip off to anywhen we really want to travel to.

How about that? Is that possible?

Time is infinitely strange, the deeper you get into trying to understand it. It seems to be irrevocably linked up to the other key forces in the Universe, like Space and Gravity. But the short answer is that according to our best scientific understanding at the present moment, Time Travel is absolutely possible in one direction – forward into the Future. Some experimenters claim to be doing it already and lots of others say that they know how to do it.

As to the other “direction” – back into the Past – officially, there are no laws of Physics that forbid it but many of the people that think about such things believe that it is a far less likely prospect than forward Time Travel.

There are many theories on why Time Travel should be feasible but just as many on why it isn’t. And as soon as you delve into the subject, many aspects of traveling in Time quickly spiral off into the problems of Paradox.

So, getting a grip on Time Travel - like with so many other areas of Time we’ve looked at - is slippery, to say the least. We need to consider it from the viewpoints of Physics, Philosophy and informed conjecture. So let’s give it a go and later, we’ll bring in one of the greatest Science Fiction writers of all time, Joe Haldeman, to tell us what he thinks.

Read more of Allan Eastman’s article The Time Traveler's Life - Part One, found at our guest feature section All the Time in the World.