Chapter 10

THE YEARS

Sidereal year
It is the interval between two successive coincidences of the sun’s true
center with a fixed direction in space. It is also the time taken by the
earth to complete one revolution around the sun. It is equal to 365.2564
mean solar days.
Tropical year
It is the interval in time between two successive coincidences of the true
sun’s center with the first point of Aries. It is equal to 365.2422 mean
solar days. This is due to the fact that the first point of Aries has a
westward motion about 50” year along the ecliptic due to precession of
the equinoxes as explained earlier.
Anomalistic Year
Is the interval of time between two successive coincidences of the true
suns center with the perigee in its apparent orbit. It is equal to 365.2596
mean solar days. Since the point of perigee moves eastwards by about
11” arc annually, the anomalistic year is about 5 minutes longer than the
sidereal year.
Civil year
Life on earth is governed by seasons and the obvious choice of a year
would be a tropical year. It is also necessary that a calendar year
should contain a full number of days. In order to do so a Julian calendar
consisting of 3 civil years of 365 days followed by a 4th civil year of 366
days called then leap year was introduced. Thus according to the Julian
calendar the average length of a civil year was exactly 365.25 mean
solar days. This is 0.0078 mean solar days or about 11 minutes longer
than the tropical year. This slow accumulation over many years would
have put the calendar out of step with the seasons.
To allow for this a Georgian calendar was formed in 1582. 3 leap years
of the Julian calendar are omitted in every 400 years. The leap years
omitted are the century years in which the numbers of centuries are not
divisible by 4. For example of the 1700, 1800, 1900, 2000 which were
leap years in Julian calendar only the 2000 remains as a leap year in
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the Georgian version. Thus in 400 years we have now 97 leap years
and 303 years of 365 days. This makes the average length of a civil
year to 365.2425 mean solar days which is quite close to the length of a
tropical year.

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