(www.neomundo.com.ar_/_BoletÃn_UNAM-DGCS-126) leap year every four years added to the Gregorian calendar in Western cultures, was considered implicit in the maya conception, explained Daniel Flores Gutierrez, researcher of the Institute of astronomy (IA) of the UNAM.
“There are certain data and sources indicating that the Mayans took account of the days by groups of four years, which they called year of the North, South, East and West.
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“The days not started at the same time.” “In the years of the East began to the Sunrise, and the following noon, sunset the Sun and, finally, to midnight”, explained.
In this way, each age group integrated a fourth day of adjustments, together meant four quarters or more one day, that did not need a name, since it was an intrinsic adjustment, added the expert on Archaeoastronomy.
29 February, adjust Western
Unlike the maya counting it integrated into each annual period a quarter of a day, in the Gregorian calendar that governs us adjustment occurs every four years and added on 29 February; thus generates a year of 366 days every four years.
“It’s a correction to the calendar, which was created to count groups of ten numbers.” “The annual account, 365 days, is what we call a immeasurable, since the days are integers, but periodic motion is fractional,” explained flower.
The Earth gives back, but not exactly on the number of days that we say, but that day a fraction of hours, minutes and seconds that accumulate, and we have to correct it, for not outdated us. Why every four years is change, with a day more than it is on February 29, he added.
The leap, as this 2012 years are divisible between four (as happened in 2004 and 2008), except if they are divisible between one hundred (as it will happen in the 2200 and 2100), but in the case of being divisible among 400 (such as the year 2000 and the 2400).
Flowers recalled that the seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter not always start the same day and time, they have small variants.
“This occurs because the schedules are made up of whole numbers of days, our year has 365 days.” But the astronomical cycles are immeasurable, i.e. not consist of integers of days.
“Earth travels in its orbit around the Sun in 365.24219 days, hence, at the end of the year, missing nearly a quarter of a day so that it reaches its same position from the previous year in the vault of heaven.” “Why use age leap, with which the corrections are made”, pointed out.
MAYA prediction of ECLIPSES
The Mayans developed an extensive astronomical knowledge, by its constant observation of the sky and the rigorous registration carried out of the various phenomena that watched.
Pointed out, for example, the recurrence of solar eclipses, they set up a table of prediction of these phenomena which contains 69 dates which coincide approximately with solar eclipses and cover a period of 33 years in the Dresden Codex.
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