Last day of Summer 2015

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Well here we are the last day of summer 2015. A very poor miserable summer full of bad weather and tragic news stories.

The Julian calendar has a regular year of 365 days divided into 12 months, as listed in Table of months.

A leap day is added to February every four years. The Julian year is, therefore, on average 365.25 days long. It was intended to approximate the tropical (solar) year. Although Greek astronomers had known, at least since Hipparchus, a century before the Julian reform, that the tropical year was a few minutes shorter than 365.25 days, the calendar did not compensate for this difference.

As a result, the year gained about three days every four centuries compared to observed equinox times and the seasons. This discrepancy was corrected by the Gregorian reform of 1582.

The Gregorian calendar has the same months and month lengths as the Julian calendar, but, in the Gregorian calendar, years evenly divisible by 100 are not leap years, except that years evenly divisible by 400 remain leap years.[2] Consequently, the Julian calendar is currently 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar; for instance, 1 January in the Julian calendar is 14 January in the Gregorian.

Old Style (O.S.) and New Style (N.S.) are sometimes used with dates to indicate either whether the start of the Julian year has been adjusted to start on 1 January (N.S.) even though documents written at the time use a different start of year (O.S.), or whether a date conforms to the Julian calendar (O.S.) rather than the Gregorian (N.S.). Dual dating uses two consecutive years because of differences in the starting date of the year, or includes both the Julian and Gregorian dates.

The Julian calendar has been replaced as the civil calendar by the Gregorian calendar in all countries which formerly used it, although it continued to be the civil calendar of some countries into the 20th century.

Among the last countries to convert to the Gregorian calendar were Russia (in 1918) and Greece (in 1923).[3] As of 1930, all countries that were using the Julian calendar had discontinued it. Most Christian denominations in the West and areas evangelized by Western churches have also replaced the Julian calendar with the Gregorian as the basis for their liturgical calendars. However, most branches of the Eastern Orthodox Church still use the Julian calendar for calculating the dates of moveable feasts, including Easter (Pascha). Some Orthodox churches have adopted the Revised Julian calendar for the observance of fixed feasts, while other Orthodox churches retain the Julian calendar for all purposes.[4] The Julian calendar is still used by the Berber people of North Africa,[citation needed] and on Mount Athos and certain people in Ireland because their da told them or that is what they heard in school back in the day