|
Days and Dates |
What day of the week . . .Enter the data and click on "Calculate" to find out the day of the week for any date within the years 1752 to 2099 (see note below). The result given will relate to the date in Britain and Ireland, taking into account the changeover to the Gregorian Calendar in 1752. Note:- This program will accept the input of any date from the year 1000. Results are however not accurate for dates prior to 25 March 1752 as the program does not currently take into account the fact that the year used to start on 25 March. It is hoped that a fix will be provided in due course. About the Gregorian Calendar . . . The earth takes approximately 365.25 days to revolve around the sun. In order to keep the calendar in sync with the seasons, four quarter days are added together to give us the extra day every leap year. Under the original Julian Calendar every fourth year was a leap year without exception. The time taken for the earth the revolve around the sun is more precisely 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45 seconds (i.e. just over 11 minutes short of the quarter day). As a result, the Julian Calendar slowly went out of sync with the seasons. This affected the Church's festivals (e.g. see information on Easter below) and so to rectify the situation, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian Calendar in 1582. According to this new system, the leap year is omitted on the century change unless the year is a multiple of 400. So for example, 1900 was not a leap year but 2000 will be a leap year. The Gregorian Calendar was slowly adopted throughout Europe. It was introduced to Britain in 1752, at which point it was necessary to omit 11 days in order to bring the dates in line. In September of that year, the 2nd day was immediately followed by the 14th. This caused much unrest, even resulting in riots. Some people were so disturbed that they feared their lives had been cut short by 11 days! |