Leap Day 2024
Our calendar is not entirely consistent with the reality of the solar system: while a year in the Gregorian calendar has 365 days, the Earth doesn't actually take 365 days to go around the Sun. It takes 5 hours, 48 minutes and 56 seconds longer. This may not sound like much on paper, but if we were to accumulate this discrepancy year after year, our calendar would no longer have any connection with the seasons, at a rate of 24 days per century. We'd end up celebrating Christmas in spring, then in the middle of a summer heatwave, while July would be characterized by freezing temperatures.
To maintain seasonal consistency, these hours have to be "caught up". As a result, an extra day is regularly added to the calendar. This is known as a leap year: a year of 366 days, instead of 365. But this doesn't completely solve the problem: where to set the day? Why not create a December 32, for example?
More logically, this extra day is added to the shortest month of the year, February, which usually comprises 28 days. This can't happen every year, so a leap year is one in which the year is divisible by four. This happens approximately every four years. To make things more complex: a year can't be a leap year if it's a multiple of 100, unless it's also a multiple of 400 (as a result, 2000 is a leap year, not 1900).
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