World Aviation and Astronautics Day is celebrated on April 12 every year. It is a memorable date, which is dedicated to the first manned flight in space.
Cosmonautics Day was established as a public holiday in the USSR in 1962 and received international status in 1968 at a conference of the International Federation of Aviation.
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin on the Vostok-1 spacecraft made an orbital flight around the Earth for the first time in the world and opened the era of manned spaceflight. Gagarin’s flight lasted 108 minutes, and the name of the cosmonaut became widely known throughout the world.
The first international flight in the history of astronautics took place in 1975. The pioneers were the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz-19 and the American spacecraft Apollo.
And in 2011, in honor of the 50th anniversary of manned spaceflight, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed April 12 as the International Human Spaceflight Day.
This day also marks:
World hamster day. This is a party for lovers of small rodents. The date of the holiday is not accidental: on this day in 1930, Hebrew University professor Israel Aharoni went on an expedition, the purpose of which was to search for Syrian hamsters in a cornfield for their further domestication. April 12 was therefore the starting point for the domestication of these rodents.
International Day of Lucid Dreaming. This phenomenon was first formulated by the Dutch psychologist Frederik van Eeden. He began keeping a dream journal as early as 1889, but it was not until 1896 that he began to systematically study dreams. Since then, Eden began to develop a theory of dreams.
In 1909 he published preliminary studies of dreams in the fictional work The Bride of the Night: Vico Muralto’s Memoirs, published in English as The Dream Bride.
And in 1913, the article “A Study of Dreams” was published, where Eden exposed the beginnings of his theory of dreams, in which the central place was given to lucid dreams.
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