Published 11:05 IST, February 29th 2020
'Notice anything different about today?': Google celebrates Leap Day with Doodle
Today’s Doodle is jumping for joy on Leap day, the 29th day of February that only occurs about every four years, to keep calendars in alignment with the Earth.
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Google is celebrating Leap Day, a day that comes around once every four years, with a fancy doodle. The doodle features the number 29 placed in the middle of the giant sun. That’s because leap years occur to keep the calendars in alignment with the Earth and Sun.
Google describes the doodle saying, “Notice anything different about today? Let’s jump right into it. Today’s Doodle is jumping for joy on Leap day, the 29th day of February that only occurs about every four years, to keep our calendars in alignment with the Earth and Sun. We HOP you have a good one, Happy Leap Day”, it added.
Emphasizing that the year got an extra day added to it, google placed the number 29 between 28 and 1 to remind people that today was 24 hours of added opportunity. Leap years are constituted in the year to rectify the gap between duration of tropic years to make it a total of 365, and hence 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45.10 seconds must be added to it. This is compensated by adding another day every four years in the month of February.
Leap year helps to keep calendar in sync
This year around, the Leap year falls on Saturday, in 2016 it fell on Monday. As for people that were born on the Leap day like the French filmmaker, playwright, & novelist Marcel Pagnol, they would have to celebrate their birthdays either on the 28th February or the 1st of March. But during the Leap Year, they get to celebrate birthday on exact same date after a span of over 4 years.
Interestingly, the extra day is added in the month of February as it is the shortest month of the year. Leap year helps to keep the calendar in sync with the Earth’s rotation around the Sun. If there was no extra day added to the February, the Earth would fall behind by about 6 hours a year, explains Google. However, the rule also goes that the Leap year should be divisible by 4, except for years that can be directly divided by 100.
11:05 IST, February 29th 2020