Articles
Updated
Short pieces on the things the countdown depends on. Each one ends with its sources.
- How many days are left in the year? — The live number, a table for every month, and how the count is worked out.
- Why leap years exist, and why February gets the extra day — 365.2422 days, Julius Caesar, Pope Gregory XIII, and the odd-numbered months of Rome.
- Where New Year arrives first, and where it arrives last — Kiritimati at UTC+14, Baker Island at UTC−12, and the 26 hours in between.
- How time zones work — Longitude, 15° an hour, UTC offsets, and why the zone map is bent.
- Why time zones exist — Railways, Sandford Fleming and what the 1884 conference actually decided.
- How many days, hours, minutes and seconds are in a year? — 31,536,000 seconds, 8,760 hours, 52 weeks and a day — the table, common and leap.
- When the year ends around the world — Midnight on 1 January for major cities, expressed in UTC — a 26-hour wave.
- New Year in every time zone: 37 offsets, first to last — All 37 offsets New Year passes through, and the moment of each midnight in UTC.
- Midnight sun and polar night — Why the Sun stays up for months near the poles, and why the calendar keeps counting.
- Solstices and equinoxes — Why days lengthen and shorten, the longest and shortest days, and why neither is New Year.
- Solar and lunar eclipses — What lines up, how often, how long, and why the Moon turns red.
- Time in Antarctica — No time zone of its own: each research station picks its clock, from UTC−3 to UTC+13.
- UTC, GMT and leap seconds — What clocks are set to, atomic time, GMT vs UTC, and the 27 leap seconds.
- Daylight saving time — What it is, who uses it, and why the hours digit can be one off from what you expect.
- Half-hour and quarter-hour time zones — India, Nepal, Newfoundland and every other zone that is not a whole hour from UTC.
- How atomic clocks work — Caesium, 9,192,631,770 cycles, fountain clocks, and the 450 clocks behind UTC.
- Why the zone list says Asia/Calcutta — How time zones get names like America/New_York, and why an old name survives.
- Why New Year is on 1 January — Janus, Roman consuls, a medieval free-for-all, and two reforms that kept the date.
- Where the names of the months and days come from — Janus, Mars, Julius Caesar, Augustus, Thor, and the seven planets of the week.
- The year Britain skipped eleven days — 2 September, then 14 September: the Calendar Act, Lady Day, and the riot myth.
- Why a ball drops at New Year — From the Greenwich time ball of 1833 to the Times Square ball, first lowered in 1907.