- 325th Day of 2013 / 40 Remaining
- 30 Days Until The First Day of Winter
- Sunrise:6:57
- Sunset:4:54
- 9 Hours 57 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:8:35pm
- Moon Set:10:07am
- Moon’s Phase: 84 %
- The Next Full Moon
- December 17 @ 1:29amam
- Full Cold Moon
- Full Long Nights Moon
During this month the winter cold fastens its grip, and nights are at their longest and darkest. It is also sometimes called the Moon before Yule. The term Long Night Moon is a doubly appropriate name because the midwinter night is indeed long, and because the Moon is above the horizon for a long time. The midwinter full Moon has a high trajectory across the sky because it is opposite a low Sun.
- Tides
- High:1:47am/12:04pm
- Low:6:38am/7:10pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- Normal To Date:3.46
- This Year:0.78
- Last Year:4.08
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- World Hello Day (say Hello to 10 people)
- Ratification Day-North Carolina
- National Stuffing Day
- National Kiwifruit Day
- National Bundt Day
- UN World Television Day
- World Hello Day
- Transitional Government Day-Sao Tome & Principe
- On This Day In …
- 1783 --- French physician Jean-François Pilatre de Rozier and François Laurent, the marquis d' Arlandes, make the first untethered hot-air balloon flight, flying 5.5 miles over Paris in about 25 minutes. Their cloth balloon was crafted by French papermaking brothers Jacques-Étienne and Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, inventors of the
world's first successful hot-air balloons. The first successful flying device may not have been a Montgolfier balloon but an "ornithopter"--a glider-like aircraft with flapping wings. According to a hazy record, the German architect Karl Friedrich Meerwein succeeded in lifting off the ground in an ornithopter in 1781. Whatever the veracity of this record, Meerwein's flying machine never became a viable means of flight, and it was the Montgolfier brothers who first took men into the sky. Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier ran a prosperous paper business in the town of Vidalon in southern France. Their success allowed them to finance their interest in scientific experimentation. In 1782, they discovered that combustible materials burned under a lightweight paper or fabric bag would cause the bag to rise into the air. From this phenomenon, they deduced that smoke causes balloons to rise. Actually, it is hot air that causes balloons to rise, but their error did not interfere with their subsequent achievements. The first untethered hot-air balloon flight occurred before a large, expectant crowd in Paris on November 21. Pilátre and d'Arlandes, an aristocrat, rose up from the grounds of royal Cháteau La Muette in the Bois de Boulogne and flew approximately five miles. Humanity had at last conquered the sky. The Montgolfier brothers were honored by the French Acadámie des Sciences for their achievement. They later published books on aeronautics and pursued important work in other scientific fields.
- 1789 --- The 12th of the 13 original colonies to become the United States of America, did so on this day. North Carolina or the Tar Heel State, boasts the brilliant red cardinal as its state bird, the graceful dogwood as its state flower, and lays claim to being the nation’s largest producer of tobacco and textiles. Raleigh is the state capital..
- 1877 --- The American inventor announces his invention of the phonograph, a way to record and play back sound. Edison stumbled on one of his great inventions--the phonograph--while working on a
way to record telephone communication at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. His work led him to experiment with a stylus on a tinfoil cylinder, which, to his surprise, played back the short song he had recorded, "MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB". Public demonstrations of the phonograph made the Yankee inventor world famous, and he was dubbed the "Wizard of Menlo Park."
- 1922 --- Rebecca L. Felton of Georgia was sworn in as the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate.
- 1934 --- The New York Yankees purchased the contract of Joe DiMaggio from San Francisco of the Pacific Coast League.
- 1934 --- A young would-be dancer took to the stage of Harlem's Apollo Theater to participate in a harrowing tradition known as Amateur Night. Finding herself onstage as a result of pure chance after her name was drawn out of a hat, the aspiring dancer spontaneously decided to turn singer instead—a change of heart that would prove momentous not only for herself personally, but also for the future course of American popular music. The performer in question was a teenaged Ella Fitzgerald, whose decision to sing rather than dance on this day in 1934 set her on a course toward becoming a musical legend. It also led her to victory at Amateur Night at the Apollo, a weekly event that was then just a little more than a year old but still thrives today.
- 1934 --- Cole Porter’s Anything Goes opened at the Alvin Theatre in New York City. The show ran for 420 performances.
- 1941 --- 'King Biscuit Time' radio show was first broadcast from Helena, Arkansas. It is the longest running daily radio program in
history, broadcasting live blues music, interviews, etc. It is named for its sponsor, King Biscuit Flour. The ‘King Biscuit Flour Hour’ rock and roll radio program took its name from 'King Biscuit Time.'
- 1944 --- “Happy trails to you, until we meet again....” The Roy Rogers Show was first heard on the Mutual Broadcasting System. Singing along with Roy (‘The King of the Cowboys’), were the Whippoorwills and The Sons of the Pioneers.
- 1960 --- George Harrison was deported from Germany for being too young to perform there with the Beatles.
- 1963 --- U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, arrived in San Antonio, TX. They were beginning an ill-fated, two-day tour of Texas that would end in Dallas.
- 1963 --- The Elvis Presley film "Fun in Acapulco" premiered.
- 1964 --- The Verrazano Narrows Bridge opened. Actually, the upper
deck was opened to traffic on this day. The bridge, linking Brooklyn and Staten Island, was the world’s longest suspension bridge at 4,260 ft.
- 1973 --- President Richard Nixon's attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, revealed the existence of an 18 1/2-minute gap in one of the White House tape recordings related to Watergate.
- 1976 --- Rocky, starring Sylvester Stallone as the underdog
prizefighter Rocky Balboa, debuts in New York City. The movie, which opened in theaters across the United States on December 3, 1976, was a huge box-office hit and received 10 Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay for the then-little known Stallone.
- 1985 --- Former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard was arrested after being accused of spying for Israel. He was later sentenced to life in prison.
- 1986 --- National Security Council staff member Oliver North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, begin shredding documents that would have exposed their participation in a range of illegal activities regarding the sale of arms to Iran and the diversion of the proceeds to a rebel Nicaraguan group. On November 25, North was fired but Hall continued to sneak documents to him by stuffing them in her skirt and boots. The Iran-Contra scandal, as it came to be known, became an embarrassment and a sticky legal problem for the Reagan administration.
- 1989 --- The proceedings of Britain's House of Commons were televised live for the first time.
- 1991 --- The U.N. Security Council chose Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt to be secretary-general.
- 1999 --- China announced that it had test-launched an unmanned space capsule that was designed for manned spaceflight.
- 2002 --- NATO invited Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia to become members.
- 2004 --- The NBA suspended Indiana's Ron Artest for the rest of the season following a brawl in the stands during a game against the Detroit Pistons.
- Birthdays
- Rene Magritte
- Eleanor Powell
- Dr John (Mac Rebenac)
- Stan Musial
- Marlo Thomas
- Tina Brown
- Earl Monroe
- Sen Richard Durbin
- Harold Ramis
- Goldie Hawn
- Livingston Taylor
- Lorna Luft
- Bjork (Gudmundsdottir)
- Troy Aikman
- Ken Griffey Jr
- Coleman Hawkins
- Francois Voltaire
- Joseph Campanella
- Natalia Makarova
