I know how you all are in awe of my fact finding missions, and today won't be a disappointment. Between 1900 and 2020 there will be 30 Leap Years. By 2020, I'll be 71 years old-yikes. This day is added to the calendar in leap years as a corrective measure, because the Earth does not orbit the sun in precisely 365 days. I didn't know that.
The Egyptians were the first to come up with adding an extra day to the calendar and later the Romans added the 29th to their calendar as well. The creators of our calendar, introduced in 1582 decided to omit leap years three times every four hundred years. This would shorten the calendar every so often and rid it of the annual excess of 11 minutes and 14 seconds. So in addition to the rule that a leap year occurs every four years, a new rule was added: a century year is not a leap year unless is evenly divisible by 400. This rule manages to eliminate three leap years every few hundred years.
This ingenious correction worked beautifully in bringing the calendar and the solar year in harmony, pretty much eliminating those pesky extra 11 minutes and 14 seconds. Now the calendar year and the solar year are just about a half a minute off. At that rate, it takes 3,300 years for the calendar year and solar year to diverge by a day.
So there you have it. Every four years, we have an additional sunrise and sunset as well as an extra 24 hours to do something or nothing - that depends on you.
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