Sebsf

There have been many changes to the calendar which has become the world's most popularly used. The Gregorian calendar has gone through a plentiful processing stage to ensure that we all 'keep on track'.

It was that famous Emperor of ancient Rome, Julian Caesar in 46BC who made up the calendar with leap years to counter the fact that it takes a little over 365 days to orbit the sun. It was introduced in 45BC and was a great success. It was named the Julian calendar in honour of Julius Caesar.

However, there have been glitches to the calendar. You see, even with the extra day in February, we could still slowly go out of the seasonal time span. Consider this: The earth doesn't exactly take 365.25 days to go around the sun. It's about 365.2422199 days, which means it takes around 365 days, 5 hours and 49 minutes for the earth to orbit the sun. Now you may think that 11 minutes doesn't make that much of a difference but over time, it all adds up.

- 44 minutes every four years
- Around a whole day every 130 years
- Three days every 400 years

So...by now, if no one had done something about that, in the time from Julius Caesar's invention until now, we would be 15 days out of alignment from the sun. This would mean that seasons would start earlier and things would be in a frenzy. If this went on for long enough, we could all be freezing in the middle of summer!

Thankfully, something was done about it. It was in 1582 that Pope Gregory XIII revised the calendar so that there wouldn't be an extra three days every 400 years. He made another rule: centurial years (years that can be divided exactly by one hundred) will not be leap years unless can be evenly divided by 400. This meant that there would be 3 less days every 400 years. HEY - problem solved!

So the year 2000, as you all know is very special. It is the turning point of the new millenium. Another one won't happen until 3000. But it is also a centurial leap year, which makes it uber special. Another one of these won't happen until 2400. So the next millenium in which there will be a centurial leap year will be in 4000. That's a loooooooong way away.

The newly revised calendar was named the Gregorian Calendar to honour Pope Gregory XIII.

And one last thing...I just realised one of my above statements was wrong. You see, that Pope Gregory added one more rule for his spanking new design: if a year CAN be divided by 4000, it is NOT a leap year. Apparently, without this final insy winsy tweak, the calendar would be close to one whole day out of alignment from the sun by 4000. Boy! That means that the next millenium in which there will be a centurial leap year is in the year 6000.

I hope this gives that extra insight into a little bit of history

Cheerio! Sebsf 08:38, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

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