- 278th Day of 2012 / 88 Remaining
- 78 Days Until The First Day of Winter
- Sunrise:7:08
- Sunset:6:48
- 11 Hours 40 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise: 9:32pm
- Moon Set: 11:26am
- Moon’s Phase: 81 %
- The Next Full Moon
- October 29 @ 12:50 pm
- Full Hunter’s Moon
- Full Harvest Moon
This full Moon is often referred to as the Full Hunter’s Moon, Blood Moon, or Sanguine Moon. Many moons ago, Native Americans named this bright moon for obvious reasons. The leaves are falling from trees, the deer are fattened, and it’s time to begin storing up meat for the long winter ahead. Because the fields were traditionally reaped in late September or early October, hunters could easily see fox and other animals that come out to glean from the fallen grains. Probably because of the threat of winter looming close, the Hunter’s Moon is generally accorded with special honor, historically serving as an important feast day in both Western Europe and among many Native American tribes.
- Tides
- High: 2:36am/1:29pm
- Low: 7:39am/8:27pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:0.03
- Last Year:0.11
- Normal To Date:0.20
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- Ten-Four Day
- National Taco Day
- Vodka Day
- Independence Day-Lesotho
- Peace Day-Mozambique
- National Cinnamon Bun Day-Sweden
- World Animal Day
- On This Day In …
- 1582 --- Gregorian Calendar Adjustment (it corrected an accumulated 11 day discrepancy). The day following Thursday, October 4, 1582 was Friday, October 15, 1582. It was effective in most Catholic countries. The old Julian calendar continued in use in Britain and its colonies until 1752, in Japan until 1873, in China until 1912, in Russia until 1918, in Greece until 1923, and in Turkey until 1925.
- 1881 --- The player piano was invented by Edward Leveaux of Sussex, England, who received a patent for it this day. There were many player piano inventions going on throughout the world during this time. Leveaux happened to be the lucky chap who received the patent England was handing out.
- 1927 --- Sculpting begins on the face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills National Forest of South Dakota. It would take another 12 years for the impressive granite images of four of America's most revered and beloved presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt--to be completed. The monument was the brainchild of a South Dakota historian named Doane Robinson, who was looking for a way to attract more tourists to his state. He hired a sculptor named Gutzon Borglum to carve the faces into the mountain. According to the National Park Service, the first face to be chiseled was George Washington's; Borglum first sculpted the head as an egg shape, his features added later. Thomas Jefferson's image was originally fashioned in the space to the right of Washington, but, within two years, the face was badly cracked. Workers had to blast the sculpture off the mountain using dynamite. Borglum then started over with Jefferson situated on the left side of Washington. Washington's face was the first to be completed in 1934. Jefferson's was dedicated in 1936--with then-president Franklin Roosevelt in attendance--and Lincoln's was completed a year later. In 1939, Teddy Roosevelt's face was completed. The project, which cost $1 million, was funded primarily by the federal government. Borglum continued to touch up his work at Mount Rushmore until he died suddenly in 1941. Borglum had originally hoped to also carve a series of inscriptions into the mountain, outlining the history of the United States.
- 1931 --- The comic strip "Dick Tracy" made its debut in the Detroit Daily Mirror. The strip was created by Chester Gould.
- 1933 --- Esquire magazine was published for the first time. Considered racy for its time, it pales in comparison to today’s choices of reading material. Esquire can now be described as sophisticated.
- 1957 --- Jimmy Hoffa was elected president of the Teamsters Union.
- 1957 --- Leave It to Beaver premiered on CBS-TV. “...And starring Jerry Mathers as the Beaver,” Hugh Beaumont (Ward Cleaver), Tony Dow (Wally), and Barbara Billingsley as Mrs. June Cleaver. The Cleavers lived a surreal-American life. June even did the housework in three strands of pearls, fashion plate dresses, makeup and high heels. Life was so grand!
- 1957 --- The Soviet Union inaugurates the "Space Age" with its launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. The spacecraft, named Sputnik after the Russian word for "satellite," was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time from the Tyuratam launch base in the Kazakh Republic. Sputnik had a diameter of 22 inches and weighed 184 pounds and circled Earth once every hour and 36 minutes. Traveling at 18,000 miles an hour, its elliptical orbit had an apogee (farthest point from Earth) of 584 miles and a perigee (nearest point) of 143 miles. Visible with binoculars before sunrise or after sunset, Sputnik transmitted radio signals back to Earth strong enough to be picked up by amateur radio operators. Those in the United States with access to such equipment tuned in and listened in awe as the beeping Soviet spacecraft passed over America several times a day. In January 1958, Sputnik's orbit deteriorated, as expected, and the spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere. Officially, Sputnik was launched to correspond with the International Geophysical Year, a solar period that the International Council of Scientific Unions declared would be ideal for the launching of artificial satellites to study Earth and the solar system. However, many Americans feared more sinister uses of the Soviets' new rocket and satellite technology, which was apparently strides ahead of the U.S. space effort. Sputnik was some 10 times the size of the first planned U.S. satellite, which was not scheduled to be launched until the next year. The U.S. government, military, and scientific community were caught off guard by the Soviet technological achievement, and their united efforts to catch up with the Soviets heralded the beginning of the "space race." The first U.S. satellite, Explorer, was launched on January 31, 1958. By then, the Soviets had already achieved another ideological victory when they launched a dog into orbit aboard Sputnik 2. The Soviet space program went on to achieve a series of other space firsts in the late 1950s and early 1960s: first man in space, first woman, first three men, first space walk, first spacecraft to impact the moon, first to orbit the moon, first to impact Venus, and first craft to soft-land on the moon. However, the United States took a giant leap ahead in the space race in the late '60s with the Apollo lunar-landing program, which successfully landed two Apollo 11 astronauts on the surface of the moon in July 1969.
- 1970 --- In the autumn of 1970, Janis Joplin was in Los Angeles putting the finishing touches on the album that would prove to be the biggest hit of her career, Pearl. She did not live to see the album's release, however. On this day in 1970, she died of an accidental heroin overdose and was discovered in her Los Angeles hotel room after failing to show for a scheduled recording session. She was 27 years old.
- 1988 --- Televangelist Jim Bakker is indicted on federal charges of mail and wire fraud and of conspiring to defraud the public. The case against the founder of Praise the Lord (PTL) Ministries and three of his aides exploded in the press when it was revealed that Bakker had sex with former church secretary Jessica Hahn.
- 1993 --- Russian Vice-President Alexander Rutskoi and Chairman Ruslan Khasbulatov surrendered to Boris Yeltsin after a ten-hour tank assault on the Russian White House. The two men had barricaded themselves in after Yeltsin called for general elections and dissolved the legislative body.
- 2001 --- Barry Bonds (San Francisco Giants) hit his 70th home run of the season to tie Mark McGwire's major league record. Bonds also moved past Reggie Jackson on the all-time list with his 564th career home run.
- 2001 --- Rickey Henderson (San Diego Padres) scored his 2,246th career run to break Ty Cobb's major league record.
- 2004 --- American scientists Richard Axel and Linda Buck were awarded this year's Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. They received the award for their work on our sense of smell. Axel and Buck discovered genes that are responsible for our ability to recognize thousands of complex odors, and remember them throughout life.
- 2010 --- The Supreme Court began a new era with three women serving together for the first time as Elena Kagan took her place at the end of the bench.
- Birthdays
- Buster Keaton
- Charlton Heston
- Susan Sarandon
- Anne Rice
- Clifton Davis
- Armand Assante
- Damon Runyon
- Liev Schreiber
- Rutherford Hayes (19th President)
- Russell Simmons
- Jackie Collins
- Frederic S. Remington
- Nona Hendryx
- Alicia Silverstone
- Edward L. Stratemeyer - (Stratemeyer created the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1906 to produce such popular teenagers’ reading material as The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mystery series. Under the name Arthur Winfield, Stratemeyer penned twenty books from 1899-1917 about the adventures of The Rover Boss, plus forty books centered around the young inventor, Tom Switt. He, inder the name Laura Lee Hope, wrote the first of many Bobbsey Twins stories in 1904. It was titled Merry Days Indoor and Out and featured the adventures of two sets of twins, eight-year-olds, Bert and Nan and four-year-olds, Freddie and Flossie.)