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The Julian calendar, the predecessor to the Gregorian calendar, which we use today, had a leap year every four years. The trouble with that is from the time Julius Caesar introduced the calendar in the first century B.C. until Pope Gregory XIII "fixed" it in the 16th century, it had accumulated an error of ten extra days. The Gregorian calendar has three fewer days every 400 years than the Julian calendar in order to make the average length of the calendar year closer to the length of an actual year.

An actual year, the time it takes the Earth to complete one solar orbit, is

365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46½ seconds.

The average length of a year of the Gregorian calendar is

365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and 12 seconds.

The average length of a year of the Julian calendar was

365 days and 6 hours.

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13y ago

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