Leap year. It’s a delight for the calendar and math nerds among us. So how did it all begin and why?
Ancient civilizations had calendars that made periodic corrections to realign with lunar and solar cycles. But it was Julius Caesar who put into practice what we now consider leap years back in 46 BCLeap year. It's a delight for the calendar and math nerds among us. So how did it all begin and why?
It's a correction to counter the fact that Earth's orbit isn't precisely 365 days a year. The trip takes about six hours longer than that, NASA says. He introduced his Julian calendar in 46 BCE. It was purely solar and counted a year at 365.25 days, so once every four years an extra day was added. Before that, the Romans counted a year at 355 days, at least for a time.
The Julian calendar was 0.0078 days longer than the tropical year, so errors in timekeeping still gradually accumulated, according to NASA. But stability increased, Palaima said. “If the solar year was a perfect 365.25 then we wouldn’t have to worry about the tricky math involved,” Eakes said.
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