LEAP into March

2012 is a Leap Year

• Leap year consists of 366 days, as opposed to a common year, which has 365 days.
  During Leap Years, we add a Leap Day, an extra – or intercalary – day on February 29. Nearly every 4 years is a Leap Year in our modern Gregorian Calendar.

• Leap Years are needed to keep our calendar in alignment with the Earth's revolutions around the sun. It takes the Earth approximately 365.242199 days (a tropical year) to circle once around the Sun.

• However, the Gregorian calendar has only 365 days in a year, so if we didn't add a day on February 29 nearly every 4 years, we would lose almost six hours off our calendar every year. After only 100 years, our calendar would be off by approximately 24 days!

• Julius Caesar introduced Leap Years in the Roman empire over 2000 years ago, but the Julian calendar had only one rule: any year evenly divisible by 4 would be a leap year. This lead to way too many leap years, but didn't get corrected until the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar more than 1500 years later.