Good morning, Whitewater.
Sunday in the city will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 6:11 AM and sunset 7:43 PM. The moon is a waning crescent with only one-percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Americans have been to the moon six times, but that hasn’t stopped crackpots from claiming that we’ve never been there. Here’s a video that explains, in just two minutes, evidence that humans have landed and explored the surface of Earth’s only natural satellite:
On this day in AD 79, Vesuvius erupts:
In AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted in one of the most catastrophic and infamous eruptions in European history. Historians have learned about the eruption from the eyewitness account of Pliny the Younger, a Roman administrator and poet.[1]
Mount Vesuvius spewed a deadly cloud of volcanic gas, stones, ash and fumes to a height of 33 km (20.5 miles), ejecting molten rock and pulverized pumice at the rate of 1.5 million tons per second, ultimately releasing a hundred thousand times the thermal energy of the Hiroshima bombing.[2] The towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum were obliterated and buried underneath massive pyroclastic surges and ashfall deposits.[1][2] An estimated 16,000 people died in the eruption.
One thousand, nine-hundred thirty-four years later, in February 2014, Sony Pictures distributed, Pompeii, a poorly-received box office failure about the natural disaster.
On this day in 1857, Wisconsin panics:
1857 – Panic of 1857
On this date the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company failed, launching the Panic of 1857. Stocks plunged; banks and businesses across the nation, including many Wisconsin-based ventures, collapsed. The Panic of 1857 led to a depression that lasted three years until the beginning of the Civil War. [Source: American Memory Today in History]