I've been thinking about stardates recently and how they were pretty random and nonsensical at first.
As modern Trek went on, the stardates became more consistent, so you could tell when episodes of different series are meant to occur in relation to each other. However, there were still some hiccups, such as DS9 season 2 (concurrent with TNG season 7) having an episode occurring on the fourth anniversary of Wolf 359 (TNG season 4 premiere), despite the fact that neither the stardate nor the passage of time in the real world matched up with that claim.
Today, I watched the first two episodes of Voyager ("Caretaker" and "Parallax"), and it got me wondering how a stardate would convert into an Earth date. The first digit, 4, is pretty much nonsense (an early "explanation" was "because it's the 24th century!"). The second digit is 8. The second digit of a modern stardate advances at a rate of 1 per season/year. TNG season 1's second digit was 1, and it occurred in 2364. That puts DS9 season 3 / VOY season 1 in 2371.
The first thing to do to convert to an Earth date is to take the last three digits (plus the decimal) and multiply by .365. The resulting figure will be the number of whole days that have passed in the year - and the percentage of the following day that has elapsed if you wanna get really hardcore.
The stardate in "Caretaker" is 48315.6. 115.194 had elapsed. Next, subtract days (one month at a time) until you have less than a month's worth of days left. Whichever month you had most recently deducted, you're now in the next month. Round the remaining days up to the next whole number. That stardate translates to April 26. It was around this time that the Voyager was stranded in the Delta Quadrant, and the Maquis were assimilated into the Voyager's crew.
The next episode, "Parallax", has a stardate of 48439.7. That means Janeway got around to selecting her new chief engineer on June 10. Yeah...