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Leap year math!

You might think that every four years is a leap year. But you would be wrong! The extra day of the leap year was added because the earth’s orbit around the sun is not precisely 365 days. You could call it 365 days, six hours (or “three hundred sixty five one fourth” if you are a Talking Heads fan), and you would be pretty close. And that would explain how that one extra day every four years keeps the seasons from shifting over time.

However! The actual time of the orbit is more like 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, 12 seconds. You can see the problem… Over centuries, those 10 minutes and 48 seconds would cause havoc. The answer is that century years (those ending in 00) are only leap years if they are divisible by 400. So, 2000 was a leap year. But 1800 and 1900 were not. And so on. This will be super handy to know if you make it to the year 2400. Good luck!

Our photo today has nothing to do with that. Instead, it is another example of me trying to catch the split second of a splash, because why not? This time we pulled back a little, used a wider lens, and dropped a quarter instead of a dime.

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