![]() ![]() Hence, instead of 365 days, a leap year is 366 days long. But since we consider a year to be 365 days, the additional 0.25 days are added to the next calendar year, which brings the total to 1 day in the fourth year. Based on the Gregorian calendar, the theory is that a year is around 365.25 days long. What is a Leap Year?Ī leap year is a year that occurs once every four years. You have an extra day this year! Make the most of it.Before we dive into the C program to determine if the user entered year is a leap year or not, let us first understand what a leap year is. Similarly, isn’t there a joy in learning that Christmas is going to fall on a Monday and that means the holiday has been turned into a three-day weekend? In the calendars above, if you’re born on a Tuesday, your birthday will always be on a Tuesday. Over time, you get to have a birthday on every day of the week. There are merits to our chaotic calendar. ![]() It also makes it so that every 2nd of every month is a Tuesday, every 3rd is a Wednesday, and so on. Is this better? It makes it so every month is exactly four weeks. This calendar also requires a leap day every four years. In this “ International Fixed Calendar,” each month is 28 days long, and there are 13 of them (the extra month being inserted between July and August and named “Sol”.) There’s also a “leftover day” added to the end of each year (meant to be a holiday). Depends if HR lets us have off for the leap week.Īnother idea to permanently fix the calendar was championed by Kodak founder George Eastman. It’s effectively creating a new weeklong month that pops up only once a decade. To make this work, the professors add a whole leap week every fifth or sixth year. Recently, two professors at Johns Hopkins University (an economist and a physicist) suggested we switch over to a calendar that doesn’t include a leap year, and never, ever changes (meaning February 2 will always be a Tuesday, no matter what). But that doesn’t mean the current calendar is optimal. The length of day on Earth and the time it takes to orbit the sun simply neatly aligned. There’s no way getting around having to add days to the calendar. If we ignored adding Leap Days for the next 1,500 years starting with 29th Feb 2020: this how our calendar would drift through the seasons - /wXnE1tgVTh- Dr James O'Donoghue February 13, 2020 And by 2400, the autumn equinox would occur on New Year’s Eve. ![]() New Years wouldn’t occur in the beginning of winter, but late autumn instead. If we started ignoring leap years today, by the year 2100, O’Donoghue explains in the following animation, we’d be around 20 days out of sync with the seasons. We need it, because without it, the calendar would start to get out of sync with the seasons. Remarkably, this system set up in the 1500s still works. Which means the next skipped leap year will be in 2100. Nobody alive remembers the last lost leap day, but dropping those three leap days every 400 years keeps the calendar on time. Leap years divisible by 100, like the year 1900, are skipped unless they’re also divisible by 400, like the year 2000, in which case they’re observed. But we don’t because Pope Gregory devised some clever, rare, exceptions to the leap year rules. So if we were to have leap years every four years, then the calendar would still get out of whack over long periods of time. You might have noticed that a full orbit around the sun takes 365.2422 days, and not a neat 365.25 days. But there are a few exceptions when we skip the leap year. We add leap days to the calendar every four years. The current leap day tradition can be traced back to Pope Gregory in the 1500s (who corrected an early calendar set by Julius Caesar). Humans have been accounting for this discrepancy for a while now - as far back as the ancient Egyptians. This is why we have Leap Years /bCX31kymMW- Dr James O'Donoghue February 6, 2020 ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |