What are you going to do with your extra 24 hours?
Posted By Kathleen David on February 29, 2008
I have always been fascinated by leap year. That we have an extra day every four years so that the other years will stay in about the same season is really cool. I wonder how they figured out that they needed to do this.
Anyone remember the leap minute? They did that a number of years ago to sort out the atomic clock.
I treasure extra time that I get since I seem to not have enough for what I want to do.
So today I am going to do what I want to do with the exception of the dishes since our dish washer died last night. Right now I am soaking a bunch of glasses with milk scum at the bottom. Let’s see what I can get done.
I am grateful for an extra day.
Ms David,
Im sure PAD can verify it for you (He know everything… he told me so!)
Earth’s annual revolution around the star Sol takes 365.25636 days…. so roughly every 4 years, we need to add a day to the calandar. If we didn’t, in 400 years we’d have Christmas in April…
Of course it is an extra .25 SIX days so to keep the calandar correct , I beleive the powers that be added a minute to the clocks at Greenwich in the year 2000. Not sure though…. Somewhere along the way, they may have to add a Feb 30th once every millenia.
I used the extra 24 hours to move to NC. Moving can be such an unpleasant experience, I figured I probably wouldn’t want to be reminded of it for another four years…
It’s more or less coincidental that 2000 was a leap year, you know.
Basically, the year (orbit around the sun) is roughly six hours longer than 365 days (revolutions of Earth). So, in order to prevent the calendar getting too far out of synch, every four years we add in an extra day.
But you note that i said *roughly*? It’s actually pretty much five hours forty-eight minutes (and 46 seconds, but hey, who’s counting?). So, in a hundred years, we’re actually *almost* a day ahead…
So three out of four century years *aren’t* leap years.
Neat, huh?
As to “who figured it out”, well, i don’t know – but i know who *ordered* it:
“In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII ordered the advancement of the calendar by 10 days and introduced a new corrective device to curb further error: century years such as 1700 or 1800 would no longer be counted as leap years, unless they were (like 1600 or 2000) divisible by 400.”