This event only happens once every four years hence
the difficulty.
WHEN: 2-29-2008
TIME: 11:00am - 1:00pm (Two
Hours)
WHERE: Old Country Buffet
2800 DeKalb Pike - Norristown Pa. (Route 202 & Germantown
Pike)
WHY: It's a once in every FOUR years chance to meet your
fellow cachers on this date.
More details as the date grows
closer.
Private
dinning room is straight back and toward the left from where you
pay. Price for the lunch buffet is less than $10 person.
I have
placed two new caches to populate the area which should be public
near on or the event. Both are very close to the event.
SEPTA's Route
96 Bus runs past on Rt 202 from the Norristown Transportation
center which connects with the R6 from center city
and
the Rt 100 High Speed line from Upper Darby:
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Why do we need leap year?
The Gregorian calendar,
which now serves as the standard calendar for civil use throughout
the world, has both common years and leap years. A common
year has 365 days and a leap year 366 days, with the extra, or
intercalary,
day designated as February 29. A leap year occurs every four years
to help synchronize the calendar year with the solar year, or the
length of time it takes the earth to complete its orbit about the
sun, which is about 365¼ days.
The length of the solar year, however, is slightly less than
365¼ days—by about 11 minutes. To compensate for this discrepancy,
the leap year is omitted three times every four hundred years.
In other words, a century year cannot be a leap year unless it
is divisible by 400. Thus 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years,
but 1600, 2000, and 2400 are leap years.
What are your chances of being born on leap day?
About 1 in 1500.
How many people were born on leap day?
There are about 187,000 people in the US and 4 million people in
the world who were born on Leap Day.
The rules for determining a leap year
Most years that can be divided evenly by 4 are leap years.
Exception: Century years are NOT leap years UNLESS
they can be evenly divided by 400.
When did leap year originate?
The Gregorian calendar is closely based on the Julian calendar,
which was introduced by Julius Caesar in
45 BC. The Julian calendar featured a 12-month, 365-day year, with
an intercalary day inserted every fourth year at the end of
February to make an average year of 365.25 days. But because the
length of the solar year is actually 365.242216 days, the Julian
year was too long by .0078 days (11 minutes 14 seconds).
This may not seem like a lot, but over the course of centuries
it added up, until in the 16th century, the vernal equinox was
falling around March 11 instead of March 21. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII
adjusted the calendar by moving the date ahead by 11 days and by
instituting the exception to the rule for leap years. This new
rule, whereby a century year is a leap year only if divisible by
400, is the sole feature that distinguishes the Gregorian calendar
from the Julian calendar.
Following the Gregorian reform, the average length of the year
was 365.2425 days, an even closer approximation to the solar year.
At this rate, it will take more than 3,000 years for the Gregorian
calendar to gain one extra day in error.
2008 is a leap year, which means that it has 366 days instead of
the usual 365 days that an ordinary year has. An extra day is added
in a leap year—February 29—which is called an intercalary day or a
leap day.
Why is a Leap Year Necessary?
Leap years are added to the calendar to keep it working
properly. The 365 days of the annual calendar are meant to match up
with the solar year. A solar year is the time it takes the Earth to
complete its orbit around the Sun—about one year. But the actual
time it takes for the Earth to travel around the Sun is in fact a
little longer than that—about 365¼ days (365 days, 5 hours, 48
minutes, and 46 seconds, to be precise). So the calendar and the
solar year don't completely match—the calendar year is a touch
shorter than the solar year.
It may not seem like much of a difference, but after a few years
those extra quarter days in the solar year begin to add up. After
four years, for example, the four extra quarter days would make the
calendar fall behind the solar year by about a day. Over the course
of a century, the difference between the solar year and the
calendar year would become 25 days! Instead of summer beginning in
June, for example, it wouldn't start until nearly a month later, in
July. As every kid looking forward to summer vacation
knows—calendar or no calendar—that's way too late! So every four
years a leap day is added to the calendar to allow it to catch up
to the solar year.
A Quick History Lesson
The Egyptians were the first to come up with the idea of adding
a leap day once every four years to keep the calendar in sync with
the solar year. Later, the Romans adopted this solution for their
calendar, and they became the first to designate February 29 as the
leap day.
But Wait! It's Not Quite that Simple!
The math seems to work out beautifully when you add an extra day
to the calendar every four years to compensate for the extra
quarter of a day in the solar year. As we said earlier, however,
the solar year is just about 365 ¼ days long—but not
exactly! The exact length of a solar year is actually 11 minutes
and 14 seconds less than 365 ¼ days. That means that even if you
add a leap day every four years, the calendar would still overshoot
the solar year by a little bit—11 minutes and 14 seconds per year.
These minutes and seconds really start to add up: after 128 years,
the calendar would gain an entire extra day. So, the leap year
rule, "add a leap year every four years" was a good rule, but not
good enough!
Calendar Correction, Part II
To rectify the situation, the creators of our calendar (the
Gregorian
calendar, introduced in 1582) decided to omit leap years three
times every four hundred years. This would shorten the calendar
every so often and rid it of the annual excess of 11 minutes and 14
seconds. So in addition to the rule that a leap year occurs every
four years, a new rule was added: a century year is not a leap year
unless it is evenly divisible by 400. This rule manages to
eliminate three leap years every few hundred years.
It's Smooth Sailing for the Next 3,300 Years
This ingenious correction worked beautifully in bringing the
calendar and the solar year in harmony, pretty much eliminating
those pesky extra 11 minutes and 14 seconds. Now the calendar year
and the solar year are just about a half a minute off. At that
rate, it takes 3,300 years for the calendar year and solar year to
diverge by a day.
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