- 296th Day of 2012 / 70 Remaining
- 60 Days Until The First Day of Winter
- Sunrise:7:25
- Sunset:6:23
- 10 Hours 58 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise: 2:26pm
- Moon Set:12:26am
- Moon’s Phase: 57 %
- 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: 6:18am/5:21pm
- Low: 11:51am
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:0.04
- Last Year:1.49
- Normal To Date:0.89
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- Make A Difference Day
- National Nut Day
- International Stuttering Awareness Day
- On This Day In …
- 1746 --- The College of New Jersey was officially chartered. It later became known as Princeton University.
- 1797 --- The first parachute jump of note is made by André-Jacques Garnerin from a hydrogen balloon 3,200 feet above Paris. Leonardo da Vinci conceived the idea of the parachute in his writings, and the Frenchman Louis-Sebastien Lenormand fashioned a kind of parachute out of two umbrellas and jumped from a tree in 1783, but André-Jacques Garnerin was the first to design and test parachutes capable of slowing a man's fall from a high altitude. Garnerin first conceived of the possibility of using air resistance to slow an individual's fall from a high altitude while a prisoner during the French Revolution. Although he never employed a parachute to escape from the high ramparts of the Hungarian prison where he spent three years, Garnerin never lost interest in the concept of the parachute. In 1797, he completed his first parachute, a canopy 23 feet in diameter and attached to a basket with suspension lines. On October 22, 1797, Garnerin attached the parachute to a hydrogen balloon and ascended to an altitude of 3,200 feet. He then clambered into the basket and severed the parachute from the balloon. As he failed to include an air vent at the top of the prototype, Garnerin oscillated wildly in his descent, but he landed shaken but unhurt half a mile from the balloon's takeoff site. In 1799, Garnerin's wife, Jeanne-Genevieve, became the first female parachutist. In 1802, Garnerin made a spectacular jump from 8,000 feet during an exhibition in England. He died in a balloon accident in 1823 while preparing to test a new parachute.
- 1844 --- According to those who practiced Millerism, the world was to come to an end. A man named William Miller, religious leader and founder of the Adventist church, started the Millerism movement. Some say his followers got rid of all their earthly possessions and climbed to high places so as to be saved when the world ended.
- 1883 --- New York City’s nouveau riche built their own opera house on Broadway in Manhattan, and staged its first performance. The new socialites now had a theater where they could have opera boxes. Unlike the old Academy of Music, where the box seats were few and the likes of the Vanderbilts were unwelcome, the new structure had three levels of thirty-six boxes ... more than the number of millionaires in New York City, old or new. The lowest level became known as the ‘diamond horseshoe’. The Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Opera House had free opera boxes for all performances. The Metropolitan Opera House was designed by J. Cleaveland Cady. A yellow-brick building, its interior, with red velvet and gold accents, was much more ornate than the exterior. Inside, it was truly designed for the enjoyment of millionaires. When the curtains parted on this first night, Italian tenor Italo Campanini and Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson starred in Charles Gounod’s “Faust”. Orchestra-seat ticket holders paid $6 admission. The Met remained at the Broadway between 39th and 40th Streets location until 1966, when a 3,700 seat, 14-story opera house was built in NYC’s Lincoln Memorial Center for the Performing Arts ... the present home of the venerable Metropolitan Opera House.
- 1962 --- In a televised speech of extraordinary gravity, President John F. Kennedy announces that U.S. spy planes have discovered Soviet missile bases in Cuba. These missile sites—under construction but nearing completion—housed medium-range missiles capable of striking a number of major cities in the United States, including Washington, D.C. Kennedy announced that he was ordering a naval "quarantine" of Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from transporting any more offensive weapons to the island and explained that the United States would not tolerate the existence of the missile sites currently in place. The president made it clear that America would not stop short of military action to end what he called a "clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace." What is known as the Cuban Missile Crisis actually began on October 15, 1962—the day that U.S. intelligence personnel analyzing U-2 spy plane data discovered that the Soviets were building medium-range missile sites in Cuba. The next day, President Kennedy secretly convened an emergency meeting of his senior military, political, and diplomatic advisers to discuss the ominous development. The group became known as ExCom, short for Executive Committee. After rejecting a surgical air strike against the missile sites, ExCom decided on a naval quarantine and a demand that the bases be dismantled and missiles removed. On the night of October 22, Kennedy went on national television to announce his decision. During the next six days, the crisis escalated to a breaking point as the world tottered on the brink of nuclear war between the two superpowers.
- 1964 --- Jean-Paul Sartre is awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, which he declines. In his novels, essays, and plays, Sartre advanced the philosophy of existentialism, arguing that each individual must create meaning for his or her own life, because life itself had no innate meaning.
- 1972 --- Gene Tenace hit four home runs in the Series, including two in his first two at-bats, and the Oakland A’s pulled out a dramatic seven-game win over the Cincinnati Reds. It was the first of the A’s three consecutive World Series championships and their first since 1930.
- 1975 --- Air Force Sergeant Leonard Matlovich, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, is given a "general" discharge by the air force after publicly declaring his homosexuality. Matlovich, who appeared in his air force uniform on the cover of Time magazine above the headline "I AM A HOMOSEXUAL," was challenging the ban against homosexuals in the U.S. military. In 1979, after winning a much-publicized case against the air force, his discharge was upgraded to "honorable." In 1988, Matlovich died at the age of 44 of complications from AIDS. He was buried with full military honors at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. His tombstone reads, "A gay Vietnam Veteran. When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one."
- 1981 --- The FDA approved the artificial sweetener Aspartame (NutraSweet) for tabletop use.
- 1983 --- Celebrating its 100th anniversary, New York’s Metropolitan Opera featured a daylong concert with some of the world’s greatest opera stars. On stage at the Met were Joan Sutherland, Placido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti.
- 2010 --- The Internation Space Station set the record (3641 days) for the longest continuous human occupation of space. It had been continously inhabited since November 2, 2000.
- Birthdays
- Franz Liszt
- John Reed
- Timothy Leary
- Ichiro Suzuki
- Jefff Goldblum
- Christopher Lloyd
- Annette Funicello
- Catherine Denueve
- Derek Jacobi
- Tony Roberts