- 316th Day of 2013 / 49 Remaining
- 39 Days Until The First Day of Winter
- Sunrise:6:47
- Sunset:5:00
- 10 Hours 13 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:2:12pm
- Moon Set:1:40am
- Moon’s Phase: 77 %
- The Next Full Moon
- November 17 @ 7:16am
- Full Beaver Moon
- Full Frosty Moon
This was the time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs. Another interpretation suggests that the name Full Beaver Moon comes from the fact that the beavers are now actively preparing for winter. It is sometimes also referred to as the Frosty Moon.
- Tides
- High:6:39am/7:00pm
- Low:1:05pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- Normal To Date:2.50
- This Year:0.44
- Last Year:1.83
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- National Pizza with the Works Except Anchovies Day
- Memorial Day-Liberia
- On This Day In …
- 1775 --- Upon hearing of England's rejection of the so-called Olive Branch Petition on this day in 1775, Abigail Adams writes to her husband, "Let us separate, they are unworthy to be our Brethren. Let us renounce them and instead of supplications as formerly for their prosperity and happiness, Let us beseech the almighty to blast their councils and bring to Nought all their devices."
- 1859 --- The designer of the leotard, Jules Leotard, made his first public appearance as the world’s first flying trapeze artist, becoming the first to turn a somersault in mid-air and the first to jump from one trapeze to the next. Just 21 years old, Jules had been practicing
since he was a little boy. He would swing from a trapeze hanging over the swimming pool in his father’s gymnasium. The years of practice paid off ... first as the daring young man on the flying trapeze ... and second as the designer of the leotard, still worn by acrobats, dancers and exercise enthusiasts throughout the world.
- 1864 --- Union General William T. Sherman orders the business district of Atlanta, Georgia, destroyed before he embarks on his famous March to the Sea. When Sherman captured Atlanta in early
September 1864, he knew that he could not remain there for long. His tenuous supply line ran from Nashville, Tennessee, through Chattanooga, Tennesse, then one hundred miles through mountainous northern Georgia. The army he had just defeated, the Army of Tennessee, was still in the area and its leader, John Bell Hood, swung around Atlanta to try to damage Sherman's lifeline. Of even greater concern was the Confederate cavalry of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a brilliant commander who could strike quickly against the railroads and river transports on which Sherman relied. During the fall, Sherman conceived of a plan to split his enormous army. He sent part of it, commanded by General George Thomas,
back toward Nashville to deal with Hood while he prepared to take the rest of the troops across Georgia. Through October, Sherman built up a massive cache of supplies in Atlanta. He then ordered a systematic destruction of the city to prevent the Confederates from recovering anything once the Yankees had abandoned it. By one estimate, nearly 40 percent of the city was ruined. Sherman would apply to the same policy of destruction to the rest of Georgia as he marched to Savannah. Before leaving on November 15, Sherman's forces had burned the industrial district of Atlanta and left little but a smoking shell.
- 1892 --- William "Pudge" Heffelfinger becomes the first professional football player when Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Athletic Association pays him $500 to play as a ringer in a game against its rival Pittsburgh Athletic Club. Before Heffelfinger, players had traded their services on the field for expense money, "double expenses," or trinkets that players could pawn back to the team--but no one had ever openly accepted a cash payment to play football. (Baseball, on the other hand, had been frankly professional for almost 25 years.) For his part, Heffelfinger never acknowledged that he’d taken the payment. He went on to become a prominent insurance executive and congressman from Minnesota.
- 1915 --- Theodore W. Richards, of Harvard University, became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
- 1920 --- Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis accepted a contract to become the first baseball commissioner. He became the czar following the Black Sox scandal of 1919 and remained commissioner for seven years.
- 1927 --- Joseph Stalin became the undisputed ruler of the Soviet Union. Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party leading to Stalin coming to power.
- 1940 --- Walt Disney released "Fantasia."
- 1948 --- An international war crimes tribunal in Tokyo passes death sentences on seven Japanese military and government officials, including General Hideki Tojo, who served as premier of Japan from 1941 to 1944.
- 1954 --- Ellis Island, the gateway to America, shuts it doors after processing more than 12 million immigrants since opening in 1892. Today, an estimated 40 percent of all Americans can trace their
roots through Ellis Island, located in New York Harbor off the New Jersey coast and named for merchant Samuel Ellis, who owned the land in the 1770s.
- 1969 --- Seymour Hersh, an independent investigative journalist, in a cable filed through Dispatch News Service and picked up by more than 30 newspapers, reveals the extent of the U.S. Army's charges against 1st Lt. William L. Calley at My Lai. Hersh wrote: "The Army says he [Calley] deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians during a search-and-destroy mission in March 1968, in a Viet Cong stronghold known as 'Pinkville.'" The incident, which became known as the My Lai Massacre, took place in March 1968. Between 200 and 500 South Vietnamese civilians were murdered by U.S. soldiers from Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, 11th Infantry Brigade of the Americal Division. During a sweep of the cluster of hamlets known as My Lai 4, the U.S. soldiers--particularly those from Calley's first platoon--indiscriminately shot people as they ran from their huts, and then systematically rounded up the survivors, allegedly leading them to a ditch where Calley gave the order to "finish them off."
- 1970 --- The Doors made their last appearance with Jim Morrison in New Orleans.
- 1980 --- More than three years after its launch, the U.S. planetary probe Voyager 1 edges within 77,000 miles of Saturn, the second-largest planet in the solar system. The photos, beamed 950 million miles back to California, stunned scientists. The high-resolution images showed a world that seemed to confound all known laws of physics. Saturn had not six, but hundreds of rings. The rings appeared to dance, buckle, and interlock in ways never thought possible. Two rings were intertwined, or "braided," and pictures
showed dark radial "spokes" moving inside the rings in the direction of rotation. Voyager 2, a sister spacecraft, arrived at Saturn in August 1981. The Voyagers also discovered three new moons around Saturn and a substantial atmosphere around Titan, Saturn's largest moon.
- 1980 --- John Lennon’s (Just Like) Starting Over, from his Double-Fantasy album, was released.
- 1984 --- Space shuttle astronauts Dale Gardner and Joe Allen snared the Palapa B-2 satellite in history's first space salvage.
- 1999 --- President Bill Clinton signed a sweeping measure knocking down Depression-era barriers and allowing banks, investment firms and insurance companies to sell each other's products.
- Birthdays
- Grace Kelly
- Auguste Rodin
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
- Ryan Gosling
- Anne Hathaway
- Wallace Shawn
- Booker T Jones
- Al Michaels
- Neil Young
- Nadia Comaneci
- Aleksandr Borodin
- Buck Clayton
- Charles Manson