This will also answer, Why do we have leap years?
Believe it or not, each one of us has wondered this at least once in our lives. But how many of us actually got to the answer? Not much. Let’s find it today.
Although, many explanations are already there on the internet, and a lot of them are good but most of them are hard to wrap your head around. That’s why in this article I will try to explain it in the most simple way possible by ignoring complex details.
First of all, why do we have around 30 days in a month? This is because in earlier times people used to keep track of time with the help of the moon. And the moon takes 29.5 days to complete its phases.
And the reason for about 365 days in a year is that the earth takes 365.242 days to complete one cycle around the sun or as we call it now, a year.
For those of you who are not interested in history or in Romans and only want to know about leap day. It's because of the extra 0.242 days as we only take 365 days for a year. So, after 4 years this extra 0.242 becomes 0.964 days ~ 1 day. As a result, one day is added at the end of February to make up for the extra day.
First Roman Calendar had only 10 months in it which made about 304 days. Because of the other 61 days, Romans just tried to survive the winter, they didn't have time to care about what day it was. They just started the new year on the first Moon before spring. Their calendar looked like this.
The 2nd king of Roman tried something else to improve this system. First, he removed one day from all the months which had even days, because even numbers were considered bad luck in ancient Rome.
After that, we get something like this.
Now the total number of days became 304 – 6 = 298 days. He wanted his calendar to cover 12 lunar cycles which is almost 354 days. But he added yet another day to make it an odd number. So, he divided the remaining days into two months, and that's how we got February with 28 days.
How did January(Januarius) and February(Februarius) end up on the top is a story for some other day.
A lot has changed since then, the name of the months, the position of Jan and Feb and how you spend those days. We have to work hard to keep up with the ever-changing world.
I’ll be working hard and putting out some other amazing articles, you have to work hard and read them!
A lot more interesting content will be coming in near future. Let’s get a better understanding of this place we live in. Do follow for more content like this.
