# Julian Dates You just can't leave astronomers alone for a second, can you? A Julian date is the amount of time that's elapsed after the beginning of the Julian Epoch - or 4713 BC. Now, why they even use that date's beside me, but go figure. However, using such a system has its own perks. We use decimals to denote hours, minutes or second after midnight, which is a great way for us to tell computers what the date is, given that they can only read binary. As of writing this (6/4/2024), the Julian date is 2460406.5. That would tell you that I'm writing the article at noon.