Calendar Computer

How to Use the Calendar Calculator

The calendar calculator will help you find a day in either the Gregorian or Hebrew calendar. Use this table in one of three ways:

• Enter the holy day for a given year and select calculate.
• Enter a specific Gregorian date and select calculate.
• Enter the Hebrew date and select calculate

The Gregorian Calendar

The Gregorian calendar was proclaimed by Pope Gregory XIII and took effect in most Catholic states in 1582, in which October 4, 1582 of the Julian calendar was followed by October 15 in the new calendar, correcting for the accumulated discrepancy between the Julian calendar and the equinox as of that date. When comparing historical dates, it’s important to note that the Gregorian calendar, used universally today in Western countries and in international commerce, was adopted at different times by different countries. Britain and her colonies (including what is now the United States), did not switch to the Gregorian calendar until 1752, when Wednesday 2nd September in the Julian calendar dawned as Thursday the 14th in the Gregorian.

The Gregorian calendar is a minor correction to the Julian. In the Julian calendar every fourth year is a leap year in which February has 29, not 28 days, but in the Gregorian, years divisible by 100 are not leap years unless they are also divisible by 400. How prescient was Pope Gregory! Whatever the problems of Y2K, they won’t include sloppy programming which assumes every year divisible by 4 is a leap year since 2000, unlike the previous and subsequent years divisible by 100, is a leap year. As in the Julian calendar, days are considered to begin at midnight.

The average length of a year in the Gregorian calendar is 365.2425 days compared to the actual solar tropical year (time from equinox to equinox) of 365.24219878 days, so the calendar accumulates one day of error with respect to the solar year about every 3300 years. As a purely solar calendar, no attempt is made to synchronise the start of months to the phases of the Moon.

While one can’t properly speak of “Gregorian dates” prior to the adoption of the calendar in 1582, the calendar can be extrapolated to prior dates. In doing so, this implementation uses the convention that the year prior to year 1 is year 0. This differs from the Julian calendar in which there is no year 0–the year before year 1 in the Julian calendar is year -1. The date December 30th, 0 in the Gregorian calendar corresponds to January 1st, 1 in the Julian calendar.

A slight modification of the Gregorian calendar would make it even more precise. If you add the additional rule that years evenly divisible by 4000 are not leap years, you obtain an average solar year of 365.24225 days per year which, compared to the actual mean year of 365.24219878, is equivalent to an error of one day over a period of about 19,500 years; this is comparable to errors due to tidal braking of the rotation of the Earth.

The Hebrew Calendar

The Hebrew (or Jewish) calendar attempts to simultaneously maintain alignment between the months and the seasons and synchronise months with the Moon–it is thus deemed a “luni-solar calendar“. In addition, there are constraints on which days of the week on which a year can begin and to shift otherwise required extra days to prior years to keep the length of the year within the prescribed bounds. This isn’t easy, and the computations required are correspondingly intricate.

Years are classified as common (normal) or embolismic (leap) years which occur in a 19 year cycle in years 3, 6, 8, 11, 14, 17, and 19. In an embolismic (leap) year, an extra month of 29 days, “Veadar” or “Adar II”, is added to the end of the year after the month “Adar”, which is designated “Adar I” in such years. Further, years may be deficient, regular, or complete, having respectively 353, 354, or 355 days in a common year and 383, 384, or 385 days in embolismic years. Days are defined as beginning at sunset, and the calendar begins at sunset the night before Monday, October 7, 3761 B.C.E. in the Julian calendar, or Julian day 347995.5. Days are numbered with Sunday as day 1, through Saturday: day 7.

The average length of a month is 29.530594 days, extremely close to the mean synodic month (time from new Moon to next new Moon) of 29.530588 days. Such is the accuracy that more than 13,800 years elapse before a single day discrepancy between the calendar’s average reckoning of the start of months and the mean time of the new Moon. Alignment with the solar year is better than the Julian calendar, but inferior to the Gregorian. The average length of a year is 365.2468 days compared to the actual solar tropical year (time from equinox to equinox) of 365.24219 days, so the calendar accumulates one day of error with respect to the solar year every 216 years.