Fans of the Star Wars fictional universe keep track of the dates of key events with a dating system (or calendar) reckoned at the Battle of Yavin featured in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. In this dating system, BBY stands for Before the Battle of Yavin, and ABY stands for After the Battle of Yavin, so 50 BBY comes before 5 ABY, as with BC and AD. Occasionally, the defeat of the Empire at the Battle of Endor (four years after Yavin) has been used as an alternate starting year, but has generally been phased out in favor of the current standard system. When Bantam Spectra held the license for Star Wars novels, they described their books as after Endor, but Del Rey, the current license-holder, exclusively uses ABY.
A galactic year, based on the length of a year on Coruscant, is 368 standard days, one standard day being a time period of equal length as a day on Coruscant (43 hours of 23 minutes each). It is composed of 10 months.
