Another Leap Year
February 29, 2024--it's Leap Day again! At the risk of sounding like a know-it-all, I’ll just mention that a leap year is a year containing one additional day in order to keep the calendar year synchronized with the seasons. But you knew that, of course. This leap year, since there isn’t much new information to share about it, I’m going to revise and recycle a couple of blogs I’ve written four, and even twelve, years ago. You probably know that the astronomical events that cause our seasons don't happen in a precise whole number of days, so a calendar that had the same number of days every year would, over time, drift with respect to the event it was supposed to track. Early astronomers wanted the spring equinox to stay as close as possible to March 21st each year, so the concept of a leap day (or month, in some calendars) was proposed and instituted. It's amazing to think that functional calendars, including leap days, or even leap months, have been used for mo...
