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Thread: Why Leap-month/ year, What's the Rule??
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[quote=RITA,226752]To simply add an extra month is to sort out the contradition between Tropical Year and Lunar Year.How did this contraditiona come out?The length of the Tropical Year is 365.2422 days, and the length of the Lunar Month is 29.5036 days.12 Lunar months make a lunar year, that is 29.5036 X 12 = 254.3672 days, means there are 10.88 days shorter than the Tropical year, 0.91 day shorter in a month.This will cause serious problems, for example, in some year, the Spring Festival comes on an extremely cold winter, and the next year, the Spring Festival will come 10.88 days earlier, .... then 16 years later, our Spring Festival will come on a hot summer day. Hmmm, if any kind of the calendar was made to confuse people than to bring convenience to poeple, it couldn't be exist for thousands of years, they have ways to overcome this issue by leap year(day, month...)According to the lunar calendar, there are 29.5036 days in a month, to make things easier, our ancestors made Big Month-30days and Small Month of 29 days. In order to keep the first day of the lunar month happens on syzygy day, the arrangements of Big month and Small month have to be flexible. Of course all the rules were set after the strict and long observation and calculation. That's why we don't see Big month or Small month comes regularly by turns, it's no strange to see two consecutive big months or small months.How and when to add that extra month??That is to find a lowest common multiple of total days of Tropical years and total days lunar months: that is to make the total days of M(a number) Tropical years equals to N (another number) lunar months, the fomular goes like: M X 365.2422 = N X 29.5306.The result comes out with adding 7 extra months in19 tropical years. Now you see: 19 X 365.2422 = 6939.6018 and235 X 29.5036 = 6939.6910while 6939.6910 - 6939.6018 = 0.0892 (2 hours and 9 min), CLOSE ENOUGH!!The Twenty-four Solar Terms decide the timing of the leap-year/ month...---------------------------------------------------The above is only some translation work. :-) I myself did not understand why and how the leap month/ years come before i finished the above rough translation, the original article was in Chinese in www.haodaan.com, I found it easier to understand for those who can read Chinese. If anyone find it vague and needs more information about it, please post it here and i will keep learning and searching.:)[/quote]
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