- 271st Day of 2012 /95 Remaining
- 85 Days Until The First Day of Winter
- Sunrise:7:02
- Sunset:6:59
- 11 Hours 57 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:5:31pm
- Moon Set:4:40am
- Moon’s Phase: 94%
- The Next Full Moon
- September 29 @ 8:18pm
- Full Corn Moon
- Full Harvest Moon
This full moon’s name is attributed to Native Americans because it marked when corn was supposed to be harvested. Most often, the September full moon is actually the Harvest Moon, which is the full Moon that occurs closest to the autumn equinox. In two years out of three, the Harvest Moon comes in September, but in some years it occurs in October. At the peak of harvest, farmers can work late into the night by the light of this Moon. Usually the full Moon rises an average of 50 minutes later each night, but for the few nights around the Harvest Moon, the Moon seems to rise at nearly the same time each night: just 25 to 30 minutes later across the U.S., and only 10 to 20 minutes later for much of Canada and Europe. Corn, pumpkins, squash, beans, and wild rice the chief Indian staples are now ready for gathering.
- Tides
- High:9:58am/9:54pm
- Low:3:23am/3:52pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:0.03
- Last Year:0.11
- Normal To Date:0.00
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- National Chocolate Milk Day
- Ancestor Appreciation Day
- Perigean Spring Tides
About three or four times a year (in the spring and the fall), the new or full moon coincides closely in time with the perigee of the moon—the point when the moon is closest to the Earth. These occurrences are often called 'perigean spring tides.' The difference between ‘perigean spring tide’ and normal tidal ranges for all areas of the coast is small. In most cases, the difference is only a couple of inches above normal spring tides.
- World Tourism Day
- True Cross Day-Ethiopia
- French Community Holiday-Belgium
- On This Day In …
- 1825 --- England’s Stockton and Darlington line opened. It was the first line to have a passenger train pulled along the tracks by a locomotive, the first time an engine -- not a horse -- had accomplished this. (The very first steam-engine locomotive was built by Richard Trevithick, also of England, in 1804.) Several years later, the locomotive, the Rocket, designed by George Stephenson, and his son Robert, with input from Henry Booth of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, won the Rainhill Trials. Rocket, the first truly successful steam locomotive, beat out ten other locomotives and remains the model for most steam locomotives even today. Critics were a little wary of these first iron horses. One said that it would make stay-at-homes into gadabouts; honest men into liars and be the downfall of an intellectual society.
- 1869 --- Just after midnight on this day in 1869, Ellis County Sheriff Wild Bill Hickok and his deputy respond to a report that a local ruffian named Samuel Strawhun and several drunken buddies were tearing up John Bitter's Beer Saloon in Hays City, Kansas. When Hickok arrived and ordered the men to stop, Strawhun turned to attack him, and Hickok shot him in the head. Strawhun died instantly, as did the riot. Such were Wild Bill's less-than-restrained law enforcement methods. Famous for his skill with a pistol and steely-calm under fire, James Butler Hickok initially seemed to be the ideal man for the sheriff of Ellis County, Kansas. The good citizens of Hays City, the county seat, were tired of the wild brawls and destructiveness of the hard-drinking buffalo hunters and soldiers who took over their town every night. They hoped the famous "Wild Bill" could restore peace and order, and in the late summer of 1869, elected him as interim county sheriff. Tall, athletic, and sporting shoulder-length hair and a sweeping mustache, Hickok cut an impressive figure, and his reputation as a deadly shot with either hand was often all it took to keep many potential lawbreakers on the straight and narrow. As one visiting cowboy later recalled, Hickok would stand "with his back to the wall, looking at everything and everybody under his eyebrows--just like a mad old bull." But when Hickok applied more aggressive methods of enforcing the peace, some Hays City citizens wondered if their new cure wasn't worse than the disease. Shortly after becoming sheriff, Hickok shot a belligerent soldier who resisted arrest, and the man died the next day. A few weeks later Hickok killed Strawhun. While his brutal ways were indisputably effective, many Hays City citizens were less than impressed that after only five weeks in office he had already found it necessary to kill two men in the name of preserving peace. During the regular November election later that year, the people expressed their displeasure, and Hickok lost to his deputy, 144-89. Though Wild Bill Hickok would later go on to hold other law enforcement positions in the West, his first attempt at being a sheriff had lasted only three months.
- 1892 --- The Diamond Match Company patented book matches.
- 1928 --- The United States recognized the Nationalist Chinese government.
- 1938 --- The 'Queen Elizabeth,' the largest passenger liner of its time, was launched in Scotland.
- 1954 --- The Tonight Showdebuted on NBC-TV. Steve Allen hosted the late-night program which began as a local New York show on WNBT-TV in June 1953. Tonight became a launching pad for Steve and hundreds of guests, including Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme. Skitch Henderson and orchestra provided the music. Ernie Kovacs was the host from 1956-1957.
- 1962 --- "The New York Times" ran the story "Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk Song Stylist" after a concert at Carnegie Hall.
- 1964 --- The Warren Commission issued a report concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy.
- 1967 --- An advertisement headed "A Call To Resist Illegitimate Authority," signed by over 320 influential people (professors, writers, ministers, and other professional people), appears in the New Republic and the New York Review of Books, asking for funds to help youths resist the draft. In Washington, Senator Thurston B. Morton (Republican from Kentucky), told reporters that President Johnson had been "brainwashed" by the "military-industrial complex" into believing a military victory could be achieved in Vietnam. Johnson felt the sting of such criticism and he was also frustrated by contradictory advice from his advisors. Still, he thought that slow and steady progress was being made in Vietnam based on optimistic reports coming out of the U.S. military headquarters in Saigon. General Westmoreland, Commander of U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, reported that U.S. operations were keeping the Viet Cong off balance and inflicting heavy losses. Still, the home front was crumbling as Johnson came under increasingly personal attacks for his handling of the war. The situation would reach a critical state when the communists launched a major surprise attack on January 31 during the 1968 Tet holiday, the traditional Vietnamese holiday celebrating the lunar new year.
- 1989 --- Two men went over the 176-foot-high Niagara Falls in a barrel. Jeffrey Petkovich and Peter Debernardi were the first to ever survive the Horshoe Falls.
- 1989 --- Zsa Zsa Gabor, on trial for slapping a police officer, storms out of the courtroom in the middle of the district attorney's closing argument. The prosecutor told the jury that Gabor "craves media attention . . . and abused two weeks of this process for her own self-aggrandizement." Although her attorney objected when the prosecutor said, "the defendant doesn't know the meaning of truth," Gabor was already running out in tears. Gabor, was accused of slapping Officer Paul Kramer during a June 14 traffic stop. She had been pulled over for expired tags on her Rolls Royce. As Kramer checked for other violations, including having an open container of alcohol in the vehicle and an expired license, Gabor drove off. When the officer chased her down and pulled her over again, Gabor slapped him, although she claimed that she had only acted in self-defense because Kramer used excessive force in arresting her. She said that her treatment by the police was "like Nazi Germany." During the trial, Gabor violated a court-imposed gag order by calling prosecution witness Amir Eslaminia, "a little punk with a hairdo like a girl." In a bizarre attempt to make amends with the witness, she told him that she spoke Turkish, to which the young man replied, "So? I'm from Iran." Gabor replied, "Well, that's close." Later that day, Gabor was convicted and sentenced to 72 hours in jail, 120 hours of community service, and $13,000 in fines and restitution.
- 1990 --- The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the nomination of David H Souter to the Supreme Court.
- 1991 --- The Senate Judiciary Committee deadlocked, 7-7, on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.
- 1995 --- The U.S. government unveiled the redesigned $100 bill. The bill featured a larger, off-center portrait of Benjamin Franklin.
- 1998 --- Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals hit his record-setting 69th and 70th home runs in the last game of the season.
- 1999 --- Placido Domingo makes his 18th opening-night appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House, breaking an "unbreakable" record previously held by the great Enrico Caruso. Caruso, of course, was the biggest star the world of opera had ever seen. Following his New York debut with the Metropolitan Opera in 1903, he made opening-night appearances at the Met in 16 of the next 17 years. With his death in 1921, Caruso's streak stopped at 17—a mark that no other singer even remotely approached for the next 60 years. The Italian bass-baritone Ezio Pinza was the closest challenger to Caruso before Placido Domingo came along, but even Pinza failed to reach double digits, topping out at nine opening nights with the Met over the course of his 22-year career. Even Domingo never thought that Caruso's record would be broken, much less that he would be the one to break it. "But when I was in my 11th or 12th opening night," he recalled during an interview before his record-setting performance, "somebody asked me, 'Do you realize how close you are to the number of times Caruso opened the Met season?' What can I tell you? I started to think maybe I can do it.'' As a contemporary of the great Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo never enjoyed undisputed status as the greatest tenor of his time. But his far superior stamina and his broader repertoire made him the go-to choice for opening nights at the Met, of which Pavarotti sang only seven. Domingo sang his first opening with the Met in 1971, in Verdi's Don Carlo, and over the years he sang opening-night parts as diverse as the title role in Verdi's Otello and Sigmund in Wagner's Die Walkurie. When he sang at his record-setting 18th opening night on this day in 1999, Domingo did so, appropriately enough, as Canio in Ruggero Leoncavallo's Pagliacci—a role most closely associated the man whose record he surpassed, Enrico Caruso.
- Birthdays
- Don Cornelius
- Samuel Adams
- Gwyneth Paltrow
- Avril Lavigne
- Jayne Meadows
- Wilford Brimley
- Randy Bachman
- Meat Loaf
- Liz Torres
- Lil' Wayne
- Thomas Nast Political cartoonist that created the Republican elephant and the Democrat donkey
- Harry Blackstone
- William Conrad
- Earl "Bud" Powell