*Leap year origions*?

Question

Who created and implemented the leap year? Why do we have it and when did it first start?

Answer 1

a rotation is really 365.25 days, so rather then there being a quarter of a day at the end of every year they make one full day every four.

Answer 2

I don't remember the orgins but it has to do with the actual time of each day. As humans we live each day as 24 hours. In reality a full day is a revolution of the Earth around the sun which is approx. 23hr and I think like 54 minutes. So going 365 days minus the 6 minutes for 4 years makes up the lost time. So leap year is almost a day that doesn't exist because we are catching up on time.

Answer 3

Time is an illusion, people.

Answer 4

i dont know who started it. it was the guy who made our calender. it turns out that that every year we are actually 1/4 and a few secs of a day off of a full rotation of the sun so we add a day one the fourth year but were still missing seconds

Answer 5

JULIUS Caeser cuz the egyptians did it... they had the lunar calender but it threw evry thing outta proportions cuz each year was 365 1/4 days long

Answer 6

It started in 45 BC, under Julius Caesar.  The problem is that the sun takes about 365 1/4 days to go around the sun, but obviously our calendar can't account for that extra quarter of a day.  

If we didn't have a "correction" day in there every few years, we would have a problem with the cumulative effect of that extra few hours adding up.  Over hundreds of years, we'd wind up with the calendar "sliding" to where maybe January would be in the spring, or August would be fall . . . .

Answer 7

Kudos to many below. However, additional info. Julius Caesar made the extra day out of love to Cleopatra!

Answer 8

The earth takes 365.25(ongoing decmial) days to revolve around the sun.. therefore the .25 days add up and we add an extra day every 4 years.

Wikipedia the rest of the stuff.

Answer 9

Leap years are years with 366 days, instead of the usual 365. Leap years are necessary because the actual length of a year is 365.242 days, not 365 days, as commonly stated. Basically, leap years occur every 4 years, and years that are evenly divisible by 4 (2004, for example) have 366 days. This extra day is added to the calendar on February 29th.

However, there is one exception to the leap year rule involving century years, like the year 1900. Since the year is slightly less than 365.25 days long, adding an extra day every 4 years results in about 3 extra days being added over a period of 400 years. For this reason, only 1 out of every 4 century years is considered as a leap year. Century years are only considered as leap years if they are evenly divisible by 400. Therefore, 1700, 1800, 1900 were not leap years, and 2100 will not be a leap year. But 1600 and 2000 were leap years, because those year numbers are evenly divisible by 400.

Julius Caesar, Father of Leap Year

Julius Caesar was behind the origin of leap year in 45 BC. The early Romans had a 355 day calendar and to keep festivals occurring around the same season each year a 22 or 23 day month was created every second year. Julius Caesar decided to simplify things and added days to different months of the year to create the 365 day calendar, the actual calculation were made by Caesar's astronomer, Sosigenes. Every fourth year following the 28th day of Februarius (February 29th) one day was to be added, making every fourth year a leap year.