He is the pioneer for giving the concept of the leap year. You must have heard the name of Julius Caesar, a Roman politician, and conquerer who invented the concept of a leap year in 45 B.C. The system of adding days in a year is an old strategy to maximize time pairing with the solar system.Īccording to Lowe, when Egyptians approached this theory and applied it, they knew they were mistaken somewhere and also added 5 additional days to celebrate their festivities. The Egyptians used the lunar calendar to keep track of the time. In ancient times, it was quite difficult to measure the time. But this thing made the matter more confusing and the roman year and solar year ended without any synchronization. The intercalary month is added in between February to lunar cycle reasons. Mercedonius was incorporated in the year to find the difference between them. They also added an intercalary month of around 23 days known as Mercedonius. Although the problem remained unresolved. With time, they added two new months which are January and February. They didn’t know the length of the winter season.Īlso, this is why they were not connected with the solar year system. According to history, they have a year of 10 months and an undefined winter season. However, historians are still confused about certain things as how the Romans had kept track of the Earth’s rotation and how did they manage with them. This shows that the moon is 11 days behind in contrast to Earth which is one day behind in a year.įurthermore, such calendars are required to add additional months or days in the existing months known as intercalary or interstitial months to be on track otherwise they have had lost the track of earth's complete rotation around the sun. They all use a lunar-solar calendar which tells the direction of the moon along with the position of Earth rotating around the sun. If you see the calendar from different cultures that are Hebrew, Chinese, and Buddhist. It has a long history, you would love to read about the leap year history dates back to the Stone Age. Leap year also helps in keeping the schedule precise and helps in sticking to the scheduled plan. Furthermore, the festive timing would differ due to the change in timing and weather everything will go topsy-turvy. It would become something like June might be having winters and November to have summers. The months would change their seasons with the earth’s rotation around the sun after 750 years’ time span. If we go in-depth with the seasons and do not add a day after every 4 years then this might result in a climate tragedy. Moreover, the sun’s movement is in the horizon direction and it moves towards the south during winter and to the north during the summer. It tells if it is reliable and appropriate to seed, crop, and harvest according to the seasons. The weather seasons are all decided by looking at the sun also, the farming plans are based on weather prediction. He said that an accurate accumulation of the extra hours that we do not count individually in a year are calculated by adding just one day in a year.Ī leap year keeps the flow of the calendars works smoothly and the weather condition are also dependent on it to a great degree. His calculations have been perfect to keep the earth’s rotation completion aligned with weather conditions along with other schedules that are dependent on the earth’s complete rotation around the sun. The Greek astronomer Hipparchus discovered this 2000 years ago. So, in a leap year, the total time for the earth’s one complete rotation is 366 days. These 6 hours are calculated and compensated every 4 years that results in a leap year adding an extra day in February. That is 6 more hours excess in a year of 365 days that do completely unnoticed by the general populace. However, this is not the exact time of completion the earth completes its one complete rotation in 365.25 days. Everyone knows that a leap year comes after every four years, this is as basic as our understanding that the earth completes its axis around the sun in 365 days. The Origin of Leap Year – A Scientific Contextīefore we go into the history of the origin of the leap year deeply, here is an overview of the leap year that draws a context for our understanding.

List of leap years