On the determination of the earth's rotation using the McDonald lunar laser ranging data of 1971.6 – 1979.0

Using 1658 normal points of the McDonald lunar ranging data in the period 1971.6–1979.0, I calculated the Earth's rotation curve, and found an offset of −330 × 10⁻¹⁰ for UT₁ – UTC. The difference between the UT₁ values given by the lunar data and BIH is 3.6 ms. This difference and the standard error of single determinations increase with increasing interval length used in the data reduction. This is shown to be due to the neglect of the secular term in UT₁-UTC. It appears that an interval length of 2 days is suitable when calculating the Earth's rotation.