Event Passed.
To celebrate the 2024 Leap Year, Shildon Town Council and arts production company Baccanalia launched the LEAP Festival, and invited Street Cosmos to be a part of it. Over 2,000 visitors enjoyed the light art works, live music, street food... and learned a bit of science along the way!
Leap years occur, of course, because the Earth takes slightly more than 365 days to orbit our Sun. A regular year is 365 days, so we lose those extra hours each year. Leap years add a day (February 29th) every four years to keep our calendar aligned with the seasons and Earth's revolution.
Leap years were introduce into the Julian calendar in 45BC. However, County Durham's very own Venerable Bede played an important role in the history of leap years. Around 730 AD, he identified a slight inaccuracy in the Julian calendar, which assumed a year was exactly 365.25 days long. Bede discovered it was actually a bit shorter, by about 11 minutes and 14 seconds.
To honour this, artists from the Street Cosmos family worked with local children to create a craftsy solar system complete with solar revolutions on a rotary washing line!
See you again in 2028!
