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Post by grosserfluss on Feb 28, 2024 16:06:44 GMT -8
An interesting fact about the Earth orbiting around the Sun is that it moves slower during summer and faster during winter. This is why February is two days shorter and July is one day longer.
A year is actually 365 days and 6 hours, so every four years an additional day is added to February to make up for the 24 hours lost. Today is February 29th, 2024. It still interests me like how it did when I was a little kid.
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GooRoo
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Post by GooRoo on Feb 28, 2024 17:08:16 GMT -8
An interesting fact about the Earth orbiting around the Sun is that it moves slower during summer and faster during winter. This is why February is two days shorter and July is one day longer. A year is actually 365 days and 6 hours, so every four years an additional day is added to February to make up for the 24 hours lost. Today is February 29th, 2024. It still interests me like how it did when I was a little kid.
When I worked as a mainframe computer programmer for an insurance company, I wrote a module that would provide accurate dating for time periods back to the inception of the Gregorian calendar out to (ridiculous, I know) the year 37,000 ... which is NOT a leap year. The reason that the (northern) summer is longer than its winter is because the Earth is moving further away from the sun, sweeping out a much larger arc than in (northern) winter when it is closest to the sun. Earth's orbit is NOT a circle, but an ellipse with its narrowest part closer to the sun, and its wider part well out toward Mars and the outer planets. My memory may be failing me, but I believe the 'year' is something like 365.2426 days; a year xx00 is NOT a leap year unless xx is evenly divisible by 4 (2000 = leap year; 2100 /= leap year. |
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