Leap Day: Why Do We Do It?

What is Leap Day? It's a correction to align our seasons & our calendar since the Earth actually rotates around the sun every 365.242 days.

Why do we have a Leap Day? Credit: AdobeStock/netrun78

As a profession that answers to the seasons, lawn and landscapers pros should be quite happy that Leap Day exists. Admittedly, I wasn’t sure why we observed it, but this video from Interplanetary, the Youtube channel of Dr. James O’Donoghue, a British planetary scientist and former NASA scientist, presents an easy visual explanation. In very simple terms, the Earth’s orbit around the sun actually takes 365.242 days, yet our typical calendar is a 365-day year. So every four years, we add a Leap Day, February 29, to keep things in sync.

“The way we do leap years is fairly messy looking, but I can’t think of a better way to handle them,” O’Donoghue told Business Insider. “We do it so our seasons don’t migrate over time.” Bottom line: unless we want December becoming a Summer month in the Northern hemisphere in several hundred years, happily embrace the Leap Day!

For more “seasonal” related articles, see:

Snow Season Isn’t Over. The Timeline For Next Winter’s Success Starts Now.

Year-Round Revenue For Landscapers? Here’s How

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