Leap Year Issues: What's the Deal with February?

[Xilus]

whats the deal with February. is the month 28 days or 29 days?
every 4 years we have 1 extra day?
what the hell.

every year should be almost exactly the same length.

 

[Xilus]

i fear Earth time may be drifting off by astronomical factors.

 

[lekh2003]

i fear Earth time may be drifting off by astronomical factors.

Actually, this is why I don't really like the Gregorian calendar. I do have an alternate solution that I thought up, but I can't discuss it on the thread without speculating a new theory.

 

[Bandersnatch]

whats the deal with February. is the month 28 days or 29 days?
every 4 years we have 1 extra day?
what the hell.

every year should be almost exactly the same length.

i fear Earth time may be drifting off by astronomical factors.

Earth completes one orbit in approx. 365.25 days. The leap year (and other modifications accounting for the 'approximately' part) is there precisely so that the calendars don't drift w/r to astronomical events (seasons, solstices).

 

[A.T.]

every 4 years we have 1 extra day? what the hell.

Yeah, I want more extra days! One every year!

 

[sophiecentaur]

What's wrong with the present system? We are stuck with the extra 1/4 day (approximately) for a complete orbit round the Sun so you either have to have the days shifting by one every four years or use Siderial time and have our clocks marching all day every day so that Noon is at a different time every day.
Restructuring with equal length Months could avoid having to learn that "Thirty days hath September, April, June and November etc.." but there would have to be extra days bolted on somewhere because 365.25 doesn't factorise conveniently. The French had a 'revolution' and tried an alternative calendar but soon came back to ours when they stopped risking losing their heads.
The gear wheels that govern our rotation, orbit and movement through the stars are not fixed so there is no easy answer to this problem. Once you give up and use iOS, Google calendars, it's all taken care of for you. All that matters is that everyone does the same sort of things on the same day. But even that's impossible when there's an International Dateline. It must be a nightmare for a commercial traveller in the extreme North Pacific with his box of sample watches in Naukan Наукан on one day and Little Diomede the next, then back to Russia. Eat your heart out Finneas Fogg.

 

[russ_watters]

@Xilus I presume you've at least read the wikipedia article on what a leap year is for? I can't tell if you are being serious or not.

 

[PeroK]

whats the deal with February. is the month 28 days or 29 days?
every 4 years we have 1 extra day?
what the hell.

every year should be almost exactly the same length.

February, in the UK, is often a miserable month weather wise, so it's a waste having the extra day then. It would be better to have the extra day in June, when it's warmer and the days are longer.

 

[sophiecentaur]

i fear Earth time may be drifting off by astronomical factors.

Actually, this is exactly what was happening in the early days of calendars. They got the number of days in a year WRONG and the seasons kept marching away from what the calendars were telling them. There is NO regular rule for timing the Earth's rotation perfectly. Not only do we need to have leap days but they do not occur every four years. To keep things more in order, they leave out the leap day at the turn of a century but, another thing, they slip it in on the change of a millennium. These little 'tiffles' help to keep midday in Greenwich at 1200 at least once a year.
You really should read around about this - it's not intuitive.

 

[Borek]

every year should be almost exactly the same length.

And it is. It just not an exact multiply of the day length.

 

[OmCheeto]

I, for one, was quite upset when I found out that we would not get a non-leap-day in Y2K.



Anyone else?
@Janus ?

 

[Mark44]

whats the deal with February. is the month 28 days or 29 days?

Yes.
A related question is, "How many months have 28 days?"
Ans: "All of them"

What might be even more puzzling is that in 1752, Britain and the colonies shortened September by 11 days, as the old calendar had gotten so far out of whack. The calendar for that year omitted Sep 3 through 13.

 

[Helios]

The problem with the Gregorian calendar is that the leap days are not distributed as evenly as possible. Because of this, the seasons don't always start on the same day, instead we get jitter. The 400-year Gregorian cycle is rather excessive and the job could be done with just 8 leap days in 33 years. For recreation, it's fun to design improved calendars that could be used instead of the Gregorian but I doubt there will ever be a world-wide calendar reformation to replace the Gregorian calendar.

 

[sophiecentaur]

The problem with the Gregorian calendar is that the leap days are not distributed as evenly as possible. Because of this, the seasons don't always start on the same day, instead we get jitter. The 400-year Gregorian cycle is rather excessive and the job could be done with just 8 leap days in 33 years. For recreation, it's fun to design improved calendars that could be used instead of the Gregorian but I doubt there will ever be a world-wide calendar reformation to replace the Gregorian calendar.

This is an 'interesting fact' but it is no longer of any consequence to us because we have another, more reliable time standard, which is comparatively rock solid. Plants, animals (including us) and the weather do not work to the time accuracy that our time standard has. So sit back and listen to the Greenwich 'Pips' time signal on the radio or watch the time change on your smart phone. On most days, the Sun will not appear to be directly 'overhead' at Noon on your local clock - it wavers about by around 20 minutes over the year. Even Polaris, the star that has been used by navigators for centuries is not exactly over our Geographical North Pole and we have to compensate for this in astro navigation. As a way of finding North, the place of Polaris will be taken by various other stars over the next several thousand years as they appear to drift past the North Pole. You can't rely on ANYTHING up there to be in the same place at the same time of day / year, even during your lifetime.

 

[mfb]

@Helios: With the Gregorian calendar I can easily determine if a year is a leap year. With a cycle of 33 years that would be more difficult. The 100 year rule exception is very unlikely to affect you more than once in your lifetime, so you have a nice 4 year cycle instead of a few cycles of 33 years.

Did anyone mention leap seconds to keep the days in sync with the Sun?

 

[Vanadium 50]

What might be even more puzzling is that in 1752, Britain and the colonies shortened September by 11 days, as the old calendar had gotten so far out of whack.

Give us back our eleven days!

 

[epenguin]

What might be even more puzzling is that in 1752, Britain and the colonies shortened September by 11 days, as the old calendar had gotten so far out of whack. The calendar for that year omitted Sep 3 through 13.
View attachment 217182

Yes, I used to be amused by the fact that people rioted about it because they thought they had been deprived of 10 days of their lives. Where it not for Internet WWW I would not have discovered today that what I long credited ( though only half believed ) as a fact is in fact not a fact - It is more of a legend though deriving from fact. It is a fact however that for a long time rational and practical considerations took second place to suspicion because of the Popish origin of this (“Gregorian”) calendar reform, delaying its adoption for centuries in the Protestant world. Indeed there was some discontent with it when introduced in Britain. A more down-to-earth reason for discontent was that it would have brought forward an annual taxpaying day by 10 days. So this doomsday had to be rearranged on the calendar And so it came to be that the key date in the financial year in the UK is the 5th of April. Which is often felt to be a bit odd because the day somehow has nothing to do with anything else, no religious feast day, historical anniversary, or anything. I suppose it is the same day in Commonwealth countries at least and what about the US which was still British at the time of the change? (Remark by Benjamin Franklin in the links.) Some other parts of the world changed over even later. One trace of this is that the Bolshevik October revolution really happened in November by present reckoning.

http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Give-us-our-eleven-days/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_(New_Style)_Act_175

https://bloggingonhistory.wordpress...even-days-the-english-calendar-riots-of-1752/

https://bloggingonhistory.wordpress...even-days-the-english-calendar-riots-of-1752/