- 116th Day of 2012 / 250 Remaining
- 56 Days Until Summer Begins
- Sunrise:6:21
- Sunset:7:56
- 13 Hr 35 Min
- Moon Rise:9:13am
- Moon Set:12:02am(tomorrow)
- Moon’s Phase: 17 %
- The Next Full Moon
- May 5 @ 8:36pm
- Full Flower Moon
- Full Corn Planting Moon
- Full Milk Moon
In most areas, flowers are abundant everywhere during this time. Thus, the name of this Moon. Other names include the Full Corn Planting Moon, or the Milk Moon.
- Tides
- High:1:08am/3:26pm
- Low:8:11am/8:07pm
- Rainfall
- This Year:15.33
- Last Year:25.17
- Normal To Date:22.77
- Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80
- Holidays
- Malaria Awareness Day
- State License Plate Day
- Confederate Memorial Day
- National Zucchini Bread Day
- Old-Time Baseball Day
- Administrative Professionals Day
- Administrative Professionals Day
- Duck Appreciation Day
- World Malaria Day
- World Penguin Day
- ANZAC Day-Australia
- Family Day-South Africa
- National Flag Day-Swaziland
- Liberation Day-Italy
- Liberty Day-Portugal
- Sinai Day-Egypt
- Children's Day-Iceland
- Fundacion Espanola-Peru
- On This Day In …
- 1719 --- Daniel Defoe's fictional work The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is published. The book, about a shipwrecked sailor who spends 28 years on a deserted island, is based on the experiences of shipwreck victims and of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who spent four years on a small island off the coast of South America in the early 1700s. Like his hero Crusoe, Daniel Defoe was an ordinary, middle-class Englishman, not an educated member of the nobility like most writers at the time. Defoe established himself as a small merchant but went bankrupt in 1692 and turned to political pamphleteering to support himself. A pamphlet he published in 1702 satirizing members of the High Church led to his arrest and trial for seditious libel in 1703. He appealed to powerful politician Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford, who had him freed from Newgate prison and who hired him as a political writer and spy to support his own views. To this end, Defoe set up the Review, which he edited and wrote from 1704 to 1713. It wasn't until he was nearly 60 that he began writing fiction. His other works include Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724). He died in London in 1731, one day before the 12th anniversary of Robinson Crusoe's publication.
- 1684 --- A patent was granted for the thimble.
- 1859 --- At Port Said, Egypt, ground is broken for the Suez Canal, an artificial waterway intended to stretch 101 miles across the isthmus of Suez and connect the Mediterranean and the Red seas. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French diplomat who organized the colossal undertaking, delivered the pickax blow that inaugurated construction. Artificial canals have been built on the Suez region, which connects the continents of Asia and Africa, since ancient times. Under the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, a channel connected the Bitter Lakes to the Red Sea, and a canal reached northward from Lake Timsah as far as the Nile River. These canals fell into disrepair or were intentionally destroyed for military reasons. As early as the 15th century, Europeans speculated about building a canal across the Suez, which would allow traders to sail from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean via the Red Sea, rather than having to sail the great distance around Africa's Cape of Good Hope.
- 1901 --- New York became the first U.S. state to require auto license plates. They were inscribed with the owner’s initials. The fee was $1.00.
- 1928 --- Buddy, the first seeing eye dog, was presented to Morris S. Frank on this day. Many seeing eye organizations and schools continue to offer specially trained dogs “...to enhance the independence, dignity, and self-confidence of blind people...”
- 1945 --- The United Nations Conference on International Organization began in San Francisco.
- 1947 --- President Harry S. Truman officially opens the first White House bowling alley on this day in 1947. The two-lane bowling alley, situated in the West Wing, had been constructed earlier that year.
- 1950 --- In the NBA draft, the Boston Celtics used their second-round pick to select Chuck Cooper of Duquesne. That fall, Cooper would become the first African-American to play in the NBA.
- 1959 --- The St. Lawrence Seaway opened to traffic, saving shippers millions of dollars. By going from the sea to the Great Lakes across upstate New York, folks no longer had to ship goods the long, costly over land route.
- 1968 --- The Beatles refused to perform for the Queen of England at a British Olympic Appeal Fund show because "Our decision would be the same no matter what the cause. We don't do benefits."
- 1980 --- In Iran, a commando mission to rescue hostages was aborted after mechanical problems disabled three of the eight helicopters involved. During the evacuation, a helicopter and a transport plan collided and exploded. Eight U.S. servicemen were killed. The mission was aimed at freeing American hostages that had been taken at the U.S. embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979. The event took place April 24th Washington, DC, time.
- 1990 --- Drummer Mitch Mitchell sold the late Jimi Hendricks’ Fender Stratocaster guitar to an undisclosed buyer in London for $338,580. It’s the guitar Jimi used to play the "Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock.
- 1990 --- The crew of the U.S. space shuttle Discovery places the Hubble Space Telescope, a long-term space-based observatory, into a low orbit around Earth. The space telescope, conceived in the 1940s, designed in the 1970s, and built in the 1980s, was designed to give astronomers an unparalleled view of the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe. Initially, Hubble's operators suffered a setback when a lens aberration was discovered, but a repair mission by space-walking astronauts in December 1993 successfully fixed the problem, and Hubble began sending back its first breathtaking images of the universe. Free of atmospheric distortions, Hubble has a resolution 10 times that of ground-based observatories. About the size of a bus, the telescope is solar-powered and orbits Earth once every 97 minutes. Among its many astronomical achievements, Hubble has been used to record a comet's collision with Jupiter, provide a direct look at the surface of Pluto, view distant galaxies, gas clouds, and black holes, and see billions of years into the universe's past.
- 2003 --- Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader and ex-wife of former President Nelson Mandela, was sentenced to four years in prison for her conviction on fraud and theft charges. She was convicted of 43 counts of fraud and 25 of theft of money from a women's political league.
- Birthdays
- Guglielmo Marconi
- Ella Fitzgerald
- Edward R. Murrow
- Stu Cook
- Al Pacino
- Renee Zellweger
- Talia Shire
- Meadowlark Lemon
- Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky
- William Brennan
- Oliver Cromwell
- Albert King