ubiquitin,
Please read my posts more thoroughly before responding. Leap seconds have been introduced to keep in sync with an arbitrary time scale which has nothing to do with halacha. Before the first leap second was introduced that scale was already way off from what is relevant to halacha. What is relevant to halacha is a scale based on seconds of fixed length where each of those seconds from the time of chazal through today stayed equal to the mean solar second at the time of chazal. This would be about three hours off by now. Please google universal time, terrestrial time, and delta t for more information.
adocs,
The rate of the earth’s spin is slowly changing, so if we add 86400 seconds for every day that has passed from the time of the gemara, but keep those seconds fixed equal 1/86400 of the length of the mean solar day AT THE TIME OF THE GEMARA, we end up with a time which is about three hours off from what is currently shown on our clocks. Chazal gave us a fixed amount of time between molads. They could only have meant in their time scale, which means our calculations are off by this amount. However halachically we don’t take this into account when fixing our calendar.