The story
Sc. 01 · the brief
A wrong hour changes the rising sign.
A birth chart needs the birth hour, and the hour needs the time zone: an hour turns the sky fifteen degrees, so one wrong hour changes the rising sign about half the time. OCO had to read the laws instead of trusting the atlas. It started with Bulgaria and became a world audit: before 1991, the standard database leans on an astrologers' atlas, astrology citing astrology.
Sc. 02 · what we built
One record per territory, one grade per claim.
timezon.ing is a time-zone database with one record for each of 247 countries and territories: the acts read, the dated claims, a grade for each claim and a verdict against the standard database. So far 3,162 dated moments have been checked; 268 were wrong there and 132 missing. The corrections ship as patches in the database's own format.
Sc. 03 · how we built it
Unreached is a verdict; a guess is not.
Only a country's own acts confirm a year; compiled lists never do, and whatever was not reached is marked unreached, never guessed. Each year is searched on its own, because re-reading known acts checks a transcription, and only the years between them reveal a missing season. Pages photographed at the National Library in Sofia were read twice by separate readers and reconciled by one hand.
Sc. 04 · the detail
The database had lost Bulgaria a month.
The audit began at home. The standard database kept Bulgaria on summer time until 27 October 1996, but Decision 205 of that March had already set the clocks back at midnight on 28 September. A month of birth hours was wrong by one, and the paper about it is called The Missing Month.
Sc. 05 · where it stands
Published on Zenodo; nothing accepted upstream yet.
The world deposit and 28 countries are published on Zenodo, the latest on 7 October 2026. Corrections for Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova went to the IANA tz mailing list as plain-text patches; none has been accepted yet. Of the 247 records, 151 hold at least one documented claim, and 96 have not been read yet.