Were are those LEAP YEAR hours?

Question

A year on earth is 365 days and 6 hours long, that is how we get an extra day in Feb. during leap year. My question is as the 6 hours left over every year accumulate to make the extra day were does the time go and why are our clocks never wrong?

Answer 1

Maybe I am missing something here, but it is my impression that the answers that have been given do not address your question.
While there are many good explanations as to why we have a leap year, it seems to me that the question you are asking is why our clocks do not get out of sync by 6 hours each year.

Let me answer that. The problem is that you are looking at the wrong clock. The 6 hour error is not in the solar day clock, but in the sidereal year clock.

At midnight on December 31, 2000, we began the year 2001. At that point the earth was in a very specific location in its orbit around the sun.
At midnight on December 31, 2001, the earth was 6 hours short of that exact same spot when we began 2002..
At midnight on December 31, 2002, the earth was 12 hours short of that exact same spot, and 6 hour short of the spot that it began the year 2002 at when we began 2003.
At midnight on December 31, 2003, the earth was 18 hours short of that exact same spot, 12 hour short of the spot we began 2002 and 6 hours short of the spot we began 2003 when we began 2004.
But 2004 was a leap year and so we added Feb 29. And so instead of ending 2004 on December 31 being 24 hours short of the exact spot it began 2001 at, we are back at the original exact spot and are back in sync again.
Thus the whole cycle starts over.

Now as for your six hours, we truely were off by those hours each year, but because those hours are in the earth's movment around the sun and not in the earth's rotation on its axis, then the clocks do not become wrong.

I hope that helps out.

Answer 2

There 365 days a year. And a day is 24 hours. We set our clocks head one hour ahead in the spring and one hour back in the fall. This is to keep the day light a lined with what we expected; IE it's dark at night and light in the day. This due the orbit of the earth around the sun not being exactly 24 hours. This little in perfection also changes the seasons. So we have leap year to try to correct this difference. That way the winter months aren't moving until they are in May and July.

Answer 3

The whole point of the calender is to keep the days and months in sinc with the seasons. If there was no leap year, spring and all the other seasons would come one day later as each four years elapsed. So if winter started on December 21st in the year you were born, then by the time you were 20 years old it would begin on December 26th, and when you turned 80, it would begin on January 10th. As the generations pass, it would drift into February and then into March and so on. This is clearly unacceptable, so the concept of the leap year was invented, to insert an extra day in here and there, to keep everything in order throughout the ages.

Answer 4

yes, the 6 hours time 4 equal the 24 extra bhours which equal the extra day. Clocks and watches are programmed for an extra 24 hours every 4 years

Answer 5

Because a regular year in the presently-used Gregorian calender is composed of 365 and 1/4 days, another day has to be added every four years to correct some of the system's defects and also to cope with the rotation of the planets, and other reasons astronomical in nature

Answer 6

Er.. not exactly, because some year have leap years of twenty four hours which has been programmed. It has been calculated before, so it never been wrong.