It happens every four years. But I have to confess I didn’t really understand WHY we had a leap year. So I did a lil poking around and found out some cool stuff. Like did you know Julius Caesar introduced Leap Years during the Roman empire over 2000 years ago? Me neither! So here’s the skinny on WHY we still have leap year every four years:
“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 – or 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds – 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!”
source: time and date
ZOINKS! Pretty crazy huh. I think it’s so cool and weird that there are some people who technically only celebrate their birthday every four years! Are you a leap year baby or do you know one??
images: Philippe Halsman (all but last image. source unknown.)
Philippe Halsman was a renowned photographer for LIFE magazine in the 1950s (shooting an unprescedented 101 covers!). He was commissioned to shoot portraits of many famous people, and one day had the unique idea to ask each person to take one final pose and JUMP for the camera! He called the series Jumpology and as you can see, the results of his quirky request were pretty amazing. Everyone from Audrey Hepburn, Brigitte Bardot, Benny Goodman, Richard Nixon to even the Duke and Duchess of Windsor agreed to “jump”. So awesome. And so fitting for today. Oh, and that very top photo is of Mr. Halsman and Marilyn Monroe.