We study the equivalence of microcanonical and canonical ensembles in continuous systems, in the sense of the convergence of the corresponding Gibbs measures and the first order corrections. We are particularly interested in extensive observables, like the total kinetic energy. This result is obtained by proving an Edgeworth expansion for the local central limit theorem for the energy in the canonical measure, and a corresponding local large deviations expansion. As an application we prove a formula due to Lebowitz-Percus-Verlet that express the asymptotic microcanonical variance of the kinetic energy in terms of the heat capacity.