To check if any year is a leap year, please type a year number in the form below then click on the button 'Is Leap a Year? A leap year has a total of days instead of the usual as a result of adding an extra day February 29 to the Gregorian Calendar which is the calendar currently used by most modern societies.
This calendar was introduced in , to replace the flawed Julian Calendar. The year being divisible by 4 is a necessary condition, but not sufficient for a year to be leap, but for this century, we may consider sufficient until the year For this century, is not necessary to check the other conditions. This is true of almost every other planet in our solar system. Mars, for example, has more leap years than regular years!
A year on Mars is sols, or Martian days. However, it takes So, you would sometimes have to add a sol to help the calendar catch up. In a 10 year period, four of the years would have sols and six of the years would be leap years with sols. For more information on leap years, visit this NASA page. What Is a Leap Year? Eventually, this uncertain stretch of time was replaced by the new months of January and February, but the situation remained complicated.
They employed a day intercalary month known as Mercedonius to account for the difference between their year and the solar year, inserting it not between months but within the month of February for reasons that may have been related to lunar cycles. To make matters even more confusing, the decision of when to hold Mercedonius often fell to the consuls, who used their ability to shorten or extend the year to their own political ends.
As a result, by the time of Julius Caesar , the Roman year and the solar year were thoroughly out of sync. The Mercedonius-when-we-feel-like-it system apparently irked Caesar, the general-turned-consul-turned-dictator of Rome who drastically altered the course of European history.
In addition to conquering Gaul and transforming Rome from a republic into an empire, Caesar re-ordered the Roman calendar, giving us the blueprint off of which much of the world still operates to this day. During his time in Egypt, Caesar became convinced of the superiority of the Egyptian solar calendar, which featured days and an occasional intercalary month which was inserted when astronomers observed the correct conditions in the stars.
Caesar and the philosopher Sosigenes of Alexandria made one important modification: instead of relying on the stars, they would simply add a day to every fourth year. In keeping with the Roman tradition of messing with the length of February, that day would fall in the second month of the year—thus Leap Day was born.
By the 16th century, scholars had noticed that time was still slipping—Caesar's calculation that a year lasted This was a problem for the Catholic Church, as the date of Easter had drifted away from its traditional place, the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox, by roughly ten days.
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