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Leap Year

2008 is a leap year. This means that instead of the usual 365 days, it will have one extra. The additional day is February 29th and it is called an intercalary day, or leap day.
In order to understand why we need to have a leap year one must realize that it takes the Earth 365 days to travel around the sun. This is called a solar year. That extra day may not seem like much but it must be accounted for. So every four years we have a leap day, or leap year as we call it. This makes the solar year match up with the calendar year. The Egyptians were the first to suggest adding a day every 4 years to keep the calendar in sync with the solar year.

If that extra time were not made up every four years it would slowly begin to add up, or creep. After a century the difference between a solar year and a calendar year would be twenty-five days. The seasons would be almost a month off. Spring wouldn't begin until almost May and summer would start about two weeks before the first of August.
This way of keeping track of the days on our modern calendars goes back to the Julian calendar, authorized by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. It assumed that the year was 365 days long, and an extra day was added every four years.
Caesar's calendar was a fine one but it still had its flaws. It was .0078 days too long. Nitpicking, one might assume, but 1,500 years later the error amounted to 10 full days.
It was at this time that Pope Gregory XIII established the calendar that we use today. In 1582 he solved the dilemma of the 10 extra days by simply eliminating them. He pronounced that in that year only, October 4 was to be followed by October 15. England and her colonies did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 170 years later.
The Gregorian calendar was a modified form of the Julian. The good Pope reshuffled the lengths of the months into their current versions, and he adopted a way of overcoming the minor inaccuracy of the Julian calendar. He declared that in order for a year to be qualified as a leap year it must be divisible by 4 and that all century years must be evenly divisible by 400. Thus: 1600 was a leap year but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. Using Gregory's calendar it will take more than 3,000 years for the numbers to be off by a single day.
About 200,000 people in the U.S. were born on leap day. These folks are known as leapers. The odds of being a leaper are 1 in 1500.

Learn more about this author, Jim Adkins.
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