- 326th Day of 2012 / 40 Remaining
- 30 Days Until The First Day of Winter
- Sunrise:6:57
- Sunset:4:55
- 9 Hours 58 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:1:07pm
- Moon Set:12:28am
- Moon’s Phase: 63 %
- The Next Full Moon
- November 28 @ 6:47 am
- Full Beaver Moon
- Full Frosts Moon
For both the colonists and the Algonquin tribes, this was the time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs. This full Moon was also called the Frost Moon.
- Tides
- High: 5:29am/5:22pm
- Low: 11:50am/11:26pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:3.09
- Last Year:2.99
- Normal To Date:3.46
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- National Stuffing Day
- National Kiwifruit Day
- Ratification Day-North Carolina
- UN World Television Day
- World Hello Day
- Nanakshahi-Sikhism
- On This Day In …
- 1620 --- The Mayflower reached Provincetown, MA. The ship discharged the Pilgrims at Plymouth, MA, on December 26, 1620.
- 1783 --- French physician Jean-François Pilatre de Rozier and François Laurent, the marquis d' Arlandes, make the first untethered hot-air balloon flight, flying 5.5 miles over Paris in about 25 minutes. Their cloth balloon was crafted by French papermaking brothers Jacques-Étienne and Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, inventors of the world's first successful hot-air balloons. For time immemorial, humanity has dreamed of flight. Greek mythology tells of Daedalus, who made wings of wax, and Leonardo da Vinci drew designs of flying machines and envisioned the concept of a helicopter in the 15th century. It was not until the 1780s, however, that human flight became a reality. The first successful flying device may not have been a Montgolfier balloon but an "ornithopter"--a glider-like aircraft with flapping wings. According to a hazy record, the German architect Karl Friedrich Meerwein succeeded in lifting off the ground in an ornithopter in 1781. Whatever the veracity of this record, Meerwein's flying machine never became a viable means of flight, and it was the Montgolfier brothers who first took men into the sky. Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier ran a prosperous paper business in the town of Vidalon in southern France. Their success allowed them to finance their interest in scientific experimentation. In 1782, they discovered that combustible materials burned under a lightweight paper or fabric bag would cause the bag to rise into the air. From this phenomenon, they deduced that smoke causes balloons to rise. Actually, it is hot air that causes balloons to rise, but their error did not interfere with their subsequent achievements. On June 4, 1783, the brothers gave the first public demonstration of their discovery, in Annonay. An unmanned balloon heated by burning straw and wool rose 3,000 feet into the air before settling to the ground nearly two miles away. In their test of a hot-air balloon, the Montgolfiers were preceded by Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, a Brazilian priest who launched a small hot-air balloon in the palace of the king of Portugal in 1709. The Montgolfiers were unaware of Lourenço's work, however, and quickly surpassed it. On September 19, the Montgolfiers sent a sheep, a rooster, and a duck aloft in one of their balloons in a prelude to the first manned flight. The balloon, painted azure blue and decorated with golden fleurs-de-lis, lifted up from the courtyard of the palace of Versailles in the presence of King Louis XVI. The barnyard animals stayed afloat for eight minutes and landed safely two miles away. On October 15, Jean-François Pilátre de Rozier made a tethered test flight of a Montgolfier balloon, briefly rising into the air before returning to earth. The first untethered hot-air balloon flight occurred before a large, expectant crowd in Paris on November 21. Pilátre and d'Arlandes, an aristocrat, rose up from the grounds of royal Cháteau La Muette in the Bois de Boulogne and flew approximately five miles. Humanity had at last conquered the sky. The Montgolfier brothers were honored by the French Acadámie des Sciences for their achievement. They later published books on aeronautics and pursued important work in other scientific fields.
- 1789 --- The 12th of the 13 original colonies to become the United States of America, did so on this day. North Carolina or the Tar Heel State, boasts the brilliant red cardinal as its state bird, the graceful dogwood as its state flower, and lays claim to being the nation’s largest producer of tobacco and textiles. Raleigh is the state capital.
- 1934 --- The New York Yankees purchased the contract of Joe DiMaggio from San Francisco of the Pacific Coast League.
- 1934 --- Cole Porter’s Anything Goes opened at the Alvin Theatre in New York City. The show ran for 420 performances.
- 1944 --- “Happy trails to you, until we meet again....” The Roy Rogers Show was first heard on the Mutual Broadcasting System. Singing along with Roy (‘The King of the Cowboys’), were the Whippoorwills and The Sons of the Pioneers.
- 1959 --- Following his firing from WABC Radio in New York the day before, Alan Freed refused “on principle” to sign a statement that he never received money or gifts (payola) for plugging records. Incidentally, few may remember, but Freed left WABC while he was on the air. He was replaced in mid-record by Fred Robbins, who later became a nationally-known entertainment reporter for Mutual Radio.
- 1960 --- George Harrison was deported from Germany for being too young to perform there with the Beatles.
- 1973 --- U.S. President Richard M. Nixon's attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, announced the presence of an 18½-minute gap in one of the White House tape recordings related to the Watergate case.
- 1986 --- National Security Council staff member Oliver North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, begin shredding documents that would have exposed their participation in a range of illegal activities regarding the sale of arms to Iran and the diversion of the proceeds to a rebel Nicaraguan group. On November 25, North was fired but Hall continued to sneak documents to him by stuffing them in her skirt and boots. The Iran-Contra scandal, as it came to be known, became an embarrassment and a sticky legal problem for the Reagan administration. Only six years earlier, Iran had become an enemy of the United States after taking hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. At the time, Ronald Reagan had repeatedly insisted that the United States would never deal with terrorists. When the revelation surfaced that his top officials at the National Security Council had begun selling arms to Iran, it was a public relations disaster. During the televised Iran-Contra hearings, the public learned that the money received for the arms was sent to support the Contras in Nicaragua, despite Congress' Boland Amendment, which expressly prohibited U.S. assistance to the Contras. Though the communist Sandinistas had been legitimately elected in Nicaragua, the Reagan administration sought to oust them by supporting the Contras, an anti-Communist group.
- 1999 --- China announced that it had test-launched an unmanned space capsule that was designed for manned spaceflight.
- Birthdays
- Coleman Hawkins
- Dr. John (Mac Rebenac)
- Tina Brown
- Stan Musial
- Earl Monroe
- Goldie Hawn
- Lorna Luft
- Bjork Gudmundsdottir
- Francois Voltaire
- Rene Magritte
- Marlo Thomas
- Natalia Makarova
- Juliet Mills
- Macry Carsey