- 106th Day of 2013 / 259 Remaining
- 66 Days Until The First Day of Summer
- Sunrise:6:31
- Sunset:7:47
- 13 Hours 16 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:10:59am
- Moon Set:12:45am
- Moon’s Phase:34 %
- The Next Full Moon
- April 25 @ 12:59pm
- Full Pink Moon
- Full Sprouting Grass Moon
- Full Egg Moon
- Full Fish Moon
This moon’s name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.
- Tides
- High:3:44am/6:25pm
- Low:10:38am/11:21pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:16.32
- Last Year:15.30
- Normal To Date:22.38
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- National Auctioneers Day
- Record Store Day
- Teach Your Daughter to Volunteer Day
- School Librarian Day
- National Eggs Benedict Day
- Militia Day-Cuba
- Qana Memorial Day-Lebanon
- Queen’s Birthday-Greenland
- On This Day In …
- 1705 --- Queen Anne of England knighted Isaac Newton.
- 1789 --- Newly elected President George Washington leaves his Mount Vernon, Virginia, home and heads for New York, where he is sworn in as the first American president.
- 1900 --- The first book of postage stamps was issued. The two-cent stamps were available in books of 12, 24 and 48 stamps.
- 1905 --- An endowment of a college teachers’ pension fund was established by Andrew Carnegie. He donated $10,000,000 of personal money to set up the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
- 1912 --- Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly across the English Channel.
- 1917 --- Vladimir Lenin, leader of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party, returns to Petrograd after a decade of exile to take the reins of the Russian Revolution. One month before, Czar Nicholas II had been forced from power when Russian army troops joined a workers' revolt in Petrograd, the Russian capital.
- 1940 --- The first no-hit, no-run game to be thrown on an opening day of the major league baseball season was earned by Bob Feller. The Cleveland Indians beat the Chicago White Sox 1-0.
- 1943 --- Albert Hoffman, a Swiss chemist working at the Sandoz pharmaceutical research laboratory, accidentally consumes LSD-25, a synthetic drug he had created in 1938 as part of his research into the medicinal value of lysergic acid compounds. After taking the drug, formally known as lysergic acid diethylamide, Dr. Hoffman was disturbed by unusual sensations and hallucinations. In his notes, he related the experience:"Last Friday, April 16, 1943, I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home, being affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant, intoxicated-like condition characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away." After intentionally taking the drug again to confirm that it had caused this strange physical and mental state, Dr. Hoffman published a report announcing his discovery, and so LSD made its entry into the world as a hallucinogenic drug.
- 1947 --- The Zoomar lens, invented by Dr. Frank Back, was demonstrated in New York City. The Zoomar lens is a device that can feature close-up and long distance camera shots from a stationary camera. Eventually, the lens would be scaled down for use by regular photographers, not just for television. There are many different kinds of close-up/long distance lenses today, including the zoom lens named after the original Zoomar.
- 1947 --- In Texas City's port on Galveston Bay, a fire aboard the French freighter Grandcamp ignites ammonium nitrate and other explosive materials in the ship's hold, causing a massive blast that destroys much of the city and takes nearly 600 lives. The port of Texas City, a small industrial city with a population of about 18,000, was teaming with chemical plants and oil refineries that provided steady, good-paying jobs for much of the town. In the industrial sector, minor accidents and chemical fires were rather commonplace, and many stood around the port casually watching the reddish orange blaze that broke out on the Grandcamp early on a Wednesday morning. Twenty-seven members of the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department were called out to douse the flames, but the ship was so hot that the water from their fire hoses was instantly vaporized. At 12 minutes past nine, the fire caught the freighter's stores of ammonium nitrate, a compound used to make dynamite, and Texas City exploded. Wood-frame houses in the city were flattened, additional blasts were triggered at nearby chemical plants, and fires broke out across the city. The mushroom cloud from the blast rose 2,000 feet, and fragments of the Grandcamp were hurled thousands of feet into the air, landing on buildings and people. The ship's anchor, weighing 1.5 tons, was flung two miles and embedded 10 feet into the ground at the Pan American refinery. The explosion was heard as far as 150 miles away.
- 1947 --- Multimillionaire and financier Bernard Baruch, in a speech given during the unveiling of his portrait in the South Carolina House of Representatives, coins the term "Cold War" to describe relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. The phrase stuck, and for over 40 years it was a mainstay in the language of American diplomacy.
- 1962 --- Walter Cronkite succeeded Douglas Edwards as anchorman of "The CBS Evening News."
- 1987 --- The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) sternly warned U.S. radio stations to watch the use of indecent language on the airwaves. This was directed at shock jocks, like Stern, and those on your neighborhood radio station. Some stations, the FCC noted, had gone way beyond the seven dirty words made famous by comedian George Carlin in a routine from the early 1970s.
- Birthdays
- Charlie Chaplin
- Henry Mancini
- Bruce Bochy
- Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI
- Rooney Mara
- Bobby Vinton
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- Ellen Barkin
- Wilbur Wright
- Spike Milligan
- Merce Cunningham
- Peter Ustinov
- Kingsley Amos
- Edie Adams
- Herbie Mann
- Dusty Springfield
- Gerry Rafferty
- Bill Spooner
- Martin Lawrence
- Selena Quintanilla