Happy Leap Year! A Brief Reasoning & History Of "The Leap Year"

February has 29 days this year.

Every 4 years, another day is added to the calendar year to stay in tune with the solar (astronomical) year. An astronomical year - the time it takes the earth to go exactly once around the sun - is not precisely 365 days ~ it's actually 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds.

Every 4 years we get an additional 24 hours on the clock to make up for this nearly 6 hour discrepancy.

What if we didn't have leap years?

Christmas (December 25th) would start to come earlier each year. After about 20 years, it would come before the winter solstice; after 200 years, Christmas would come in the fall … since the seasons are tied to the astronomical year, because they depend on the earth's slant relative to the sun.

The establishment of the Gregorian calendar, which made the 4 year leap year, also has a correction for every hundred years (1700, 1800, 1900, etc) ~ there is NO LEAP YEAR.

But why did we have a leap year in 2000?

Every 400 years, an extra day IS NOT added to the calendar. So 1700, 1800, 1900 were NOT leap years, but 2000 was.

* Some information gathered from http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1511/why-do-we-have-leap-years & wikipedia.com