- 135th Day of 2012 / 231 Remaining
- 37 Days Until Summer Begins
- Sunrise:6:00
- Sunset:8:13
- 14 Hours 13 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:2;31am
- Moon Set:2:44pm
- Moon’s Phase: 31 %
- The Next Full Moon
- June 4 @ 4:11am
- Full Strawberry Moon
- Full Rose Moon
- Full Milk Moon
This name was universal to every Algonquin tribe. However, in Europe they called it the Rose Moon. Also because the relatively short season for harvesting strawberries comes each year during the month of June, so the full Moon that occurs during that month was christened for the strawberry!
- Tides
- High:6:49am/7:43pm
- Low:1:17am/12:54pm
- Rainfall
- This Year:15.67
- Last Year:26.17
- Normal To Date:23.30
- Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80
- Holidays
- Jamestown Day
- Jamestown Founding Day
- National Train Day
- "The Stars and Stripes Forever" Day
- Stay Up All Night Night
- Underground America Day
- National Buttermilk Biscuit Day
- National Dance Like a Chicken Day
- International Migratory Bird Day
- National Windmill Day-Nederlands
- Unification & Integration Day-Liberia
- On This Day In …
- 1607 --- Three very small ships, Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery, sailed across the ocean blue from Plymouth, England to a place the ship’s crew and passengers called Jamestown. If you have ever been to today’s Jamestown and had the chance to climb aboard the restored ships, you would wonder how anyone could have survived that historic trip in such tiny, cramped quarters. We can only assume that some of us had ancestors who were very, very short. This hearty group of Virginia Company settlers was chartered by England’s King James I, therefore, the name, Jamestown, Virginia. The group was led by Captain John Smith of Pocahontas fame and Christopher Newport. Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States. It became the capital of Virginia and remained so through 1699.
- 1787 --- Delegates to the Constitutional Convention begin to assemble in Philadelphia to confront a daunting task: the peaceful overthrow of the new American government as defined by the Article of Confederation. Although the convention was originally supposed to begin on May 14, James Madison reported that a small number only had assembled. Meetings had to be pushed back until May 25, when a sufficient quorum of the participating states—Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia—had arrived.
- 1796 --- Edward Jenner, an English country doctor from Gloucestershire, administers the world's first vaccination as a preventive treatment for smallpox, a disease that had killed millions of people over the centuries.
- 1804 --- William Clark set off the famous expedition from Camp Dubois. A few days later, in St. Louis, Meriwether Lewis joined the group. The group was known as the "Corps of Discovery."
- 1842 --- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, publishes a volume called Poems. While the 32-year-old poet had already published several other books of verse, Poems, which included works like "Ulysses" and "Morte D'Arthur," was considered his best work to date. The book confirmed his growing stature as a poet after more than a decade of writing.
- 1853 --- Gail Borden applied for a patent for condensed milk.
- 1862 --- Adolphe Nicole of Switzerland patented the chronograph -- a timepiece that allows for split-second timing of sporting events.
- 1878 --- Vaseline petroleum jelly was trademarked by Robert August Chesebrough.
- 1897 --- A statue of George Washington was unveiled in Philadelphia, PA. To commemorate the occasion, John Philip Sousa’s march, The Stars and Stripes Forever, was performed. It was the first public performance for Sousa’s march and the President of the U.S., William McKinley, was in the audience.
- 1897 --- Guglielmo Marconi made the first communication by wireless telegraph.
- 1904 --- The Third Olympiad of the modern era, and the first Olympic Games to be held in the United States, opens in St. Louis, Missouri. The 1904 Games were actually initially awarded to Chicago, Illinois, but were later given to St. Louis to be staged in connection with the St. Louis World Exposition. Like the Second Olympiad, held in Paris in 1900, the St. Louis Games were poorly organized and overshadowed by the world's fair. There were few entrants other than Americans in the various events, and, expectedly, U.S. athletes won a majority of the competitions and the unofficial team championship. In the field events, the Americans made a near-perfect sweep, winning everything but lifting the bar and throwing the 56-pound weight. Twenty years later, the first truly successful Olympic Games were held in Paris, and since then, with increasing popularity, the games have been held in various cities around the globe.
- 1913 --- The Rockefeller Foundation was created by John D. Rockefeller with a gift of $100,000,000.
- 1937 --- Duke Ellington and his band recorded "Caravan."
- 1942 --- The Women's Auxiliary Army Corps was created
- 1948 --- Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaims the State of Israel, establishing the first Jewish state in 2,000 years. In an afternoon ceremony at the Tel Aviv Art Museum, Ben-Gurion pronounced the words "We hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel," prompting applause and tears from the crowd gathered at the museum. Ben-Gurion became Israel's first premier. In the distance, the rumble of guns could be heard from fighting that broke out between Jews and Arabs immediately following the British army withdrawal earlier that day. Egypt launched an air assault against Israel that evening. Despite a blackout in Tel Aviv--and the expected Arab invasion--Jews joyously celebrated the birth of their new nation, especially after word was received that the United States had recognized the Jewish state. At midnight, the State of Israel officially came into being upon termination of the British mandate in Palestine.
- 1972 --- Fourteen years after the Giants left New York, in his first game back as a New York Met, 41-year-old Willie Mays walloped a game-winning home run to beat the Giants 5-4.
- 1973 --- Skylab, America's first space station, is successfully launched into an orbit around the earth. Eleven days later, U.S. astronauts Charles Conrad, Joseph Kerwin, and Paul Weitz made a rendezvous with Skylab, repairing a jammed solar panel and conducting scientific experiments during their 28-day stay aboard the space station. The first manned Skylab mission came two years after the Soviet Union launched Salynut, the world's first space station, into orbit around the earth. However, unlike the ill-fated Salynut, which was plagued with problems, the American space station was a great success, safely housing three separate three-man crews for extended periods of time and exceeding pre-mission plans for scientific study. Originally the spent third stage of a Saturn 5 moon rocket, the cylinder space station was 118 feet tall, weighed 77 tons, and carried the most varied assortment of experimental equipment ever assembled in a single spacecraft to that date. The crews of Skylab spent more than 700 hours observing the sun and brought home more than 175,000 solar pictures. They also provided important information about the biological effects of living in space for prolonged periods of time. Five years after the last Skylab mission, the space station's orbit began to deteriorate faster than expected, owing to unexpectedly high sunspot activity. On July 11, 1979, the parts of the space station that did not burn up in the atmosphere came crashing down on Australia and into the Indian Ocean.
- 1980 --- U.S. President Carter inaugurated the Department of Health and Human Services.
- 1998 --- The TV series "Seinfeld" aired its final episode.
- 2008 --- The Chicago City Council repealed its ban on the sale of Foie Gras.
- Birthdays
- Gabriel Fahrenheit
- Sofia Coppola
- David Byrne
- Jack Bruce
- Bobby Darin
- George Lucas
- Robert Zemeckis
- Cate Blanchett
- Meg Foster
- Tim Roth
- Otto Klemperer
- Mark Zuckerberg
- Tony Perez
- Frank Gore
- Richard Deacon