leap years??? whats it all about?

Question

theres never a quarter of a day, so where do leap years come from

Answer 1

A leap year (or intercalary year) is a year containing one or more extra days (or, in case of lunisolar calendars, an extra month) in order to keep the calendar year synchronised with the astronomical or seasonal year. For example, February would have 29 days in a leap year instead of the usual 28. Seasons and astronomical events do not repeat at an exact number of full days, so a calendar which had the same number of days in each year would over time drift with respect to the event it was supposed to track. By occasionally inserting (or intercalating) an additional day or month into the year, the drift can be corrected. A year which is not a leap year is called a common year. In fact, the Earth takes slightly under 365 1/4 days to revolve around the Sun.

Answer 2

Leap years are needed so that the calendar is in alignment with the earth's motion around the sun. Using a calendar with 365 days would result in an error of 0.2422 days or almost 6 hours per year, By adding leap years approximately every 4th year, this difference between the calendar and the seasons can be reduced significantly, and the calendar will follow the seasons much more closely than without leap years.

Answer 3

A day is the length of time the earth takes to make one revolution. The earth takes 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds to orbit the sun. In order to keep the calendar aligned so that equinoxes and solstices are on the same day each year, they need to add in an extra day every 4 years. However, that overcompensates so there is no leap year every 100 years, but there is a leap year every 400 years.

Answer 4

As another commenter said, actually a year is exactly 365 1/4 days long, but we obviously can't observe a quarter of a day so we ignore it for four years.

When the four quarters make up an entire day, we add it onto the calendar to get caught up.

Answer 5

The leap year makes up for the difference between the actual solar year and the calendar year.

Answer 6

The "calendar year" is always off by one-fourth of a day. To make up for this, every fourth year one day is added to compensate for this. Have you heard of a "leap second"? They do that every once in a while too.

Answer 7

Actually, in a calendar yr there are 365 1/4 days. So every 4 years, there's an extra day.

Answer 8

the earth's orbit is not exactly 365 days, since there are no 1/4 days, that's EXACTLY why we need leap years to make up for those quarters.

Answer 9

the month of feb gets 29 days once every 4 years otherwise theres only 28 days the next scheduled leap year is feb 2008 then 2012 and every 4 years after you get the picture

Answer 10

It is my understandings that leap years serve the purpose of keeping the known calender in check. Without them it would take around 1500 years before we would have summer in december.