Thread: weird facts
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Jeff Morris
 
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Shame on you for posting such nonsense. And you call yourself an Admiral!

What you have posted is the sidereal day, useful for astronomers. But
most of us want Noon to occur when the Sun is roughly overhead, so we
use a Solar Day, which has the 24 full hours.

The 4 minute difference per day between solar and sidereal adds up to 24
hours in a years, which is because using the Sun as a reference we lose
one rotation in a year. With reference to a fixed star out side our
solar system, our year has 366.25 sidereal days.

Leap year has to do with the extra quarter spin that the Earth does in
the course of a year. And that's off by 11 minutes, so we must forgo
one leap 3 out of every 4 centuries. This will keep things goos for
about 3300 years.

Of course, the Earth's rotation is slowing a bit, so we do have to
adjust our watches for that. (A day gained about 0.0017 seconds last
century.)

The Admiral wrote:
More utter uselessness to constipate your day with FUN!

....
The average day is actually 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.09 seconds. We
have a leap year every four years to make up for this shortfall.

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