In Scotland, Hogmanay is celebrated on New Year's Eve ...
Today is Thursday, 31st of December of 2020,
It is the 366th day of the year.
It is the last day of the year;
the following day is January 1, the first day of the following year.
The sun rises over San Francisco at 7:25 am
and sunset will be at 5:01 pm.
Today we have 9 hours and 37 minutes of sun.
The solar transit will be at 12:13 pm.
the first high tide was at 1:23 am
The first low tide was at 5:44 am
The next high tide will be at 11:40 am.
and the final low tide at Aquatic Park will be at 6:28 pm.
The Moon is 97.9% visible
now a Waning Gibbous moon
Last Quarter Moon in 6 days on a Wednesday the 6th of January of 2021 at 1:37 am
Today is…
Today is also…
International Solidarity Day of Azerbaijanis
or Old Years Day/Night
Last Day of the Year or Bisperás ng Bagong Taón, special holiday between Rizal Day and New Year's Day in The Philippines
The first day of Hogmanay or "Auld Year's Night" (Scotland)
The seventh of the Twelve Days of Christmas (Seven swans a-swimming)
The sixth and penultimate day of Kwanzaa; today’s principle is Kuumba, Creativity
On this day in history….
1759 – Arthur Guinness signs a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum and starts brewing Guinness.
1796 – The incorporation of Baltimore as a city.
1831 – Gramercy Park is deeded to New York City.
1853 – A dinner party is held inside a life-size model of an iguanodon created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and Sir Richard Owen in south London, England.
1857 – Queen Victoria chooses Ottawa, then a small logging town, as the capital of the Province of Canada.
1878 – Karl Benz, working in Mannheim, Germany, filed for a patent on his first reliable two-stroke gas engine, and he was granted the patent in 1879.
1879 – Thomas Edison demonstrates incandescent lighting to the public for the first time, in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
1907 – The first New Year's Eve celebration is held in Times Square (then known as Longacre Square) in Manhattan.
1955 – General Motors becomes the first U.S. corporation to make over US$1 billion in a year.
1961 – RTÉ, Ireland's state broadcaster, launches its first national television service.
1983 – The AT&T Bell System is broken up by the United States Government.
1983 – Benjamin Ward is appointed New York City Police Department's first ever African American police commissioner.
1991 – All official Soviet Union institutions have ceased operations by this date five days after the Soviet Union is officially dissolved.
1992 – Czechoslovakia is peacefully dissolved in what is dubbed by media as the Velvet Divorce, resulting in the creation of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.
1994 – This date is skipped altogether in Kiribati as the Phoenix Islands and Line Islands change time zones from UTC−11:00 to UTC+13:00 and UTC−10:00 to UTC+14:00, respectively.
1999 – The first President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, resigns from office, leaving Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as the acting President and successor.
1999 – The U.S. government hands control of the Panama Canal (as well all the adjacent land to the canal known as the Panama Canal Zone) to Panama. This act complied with the signing of the 1977 Torrijos–Carter Treaties.
2019 – The World Health Organization was informed of cases of pneumonia with an unknown cause, detected in Wuhan.[7] This later turned out to be COVID-19, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic
…and if today is your birthday, Happy Birthday To You! You get to share birthday cake with…
1869 – Henri Matisse, French painter and sculptor (d. 1954)
1880 – George Marshall, American general and politician, 50th United States Secretary of State, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1959)
1899 – Silvestre Revueltas, Mexican violinist, composer, and conductor (d. 1940)
1908 – Simon Wiesenthal, Ukrainian-Austrian Nazi hunter and author (d. 2005)
1930 – Odetta, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actress (d. 2008)
1930 – Jaime Escalante, Bolivian-American educator (d. 2010)
1937 – Anthony Hopkins, Welsh actor, director, and composer
1938 – Rosalind Cash, American singer and actress (d. 1995)
1943 – John Denver, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor (d. 1997)
1943 – Ben Kingsley, English actor
1948 – Donna Summer, American singer-songwriter (d. 2012)
1959 – Val Kilmer, American actor
1968 – Junot Diaz, Dominican-born American novelist, short story writer, and essayist
1977 – Psy, South Korean musician
1977 – Donald Trump Jr., American businessman and son of U.S. President Donald Trump