Wikipedia:Main Page history/2017 December 21

From today's featured article

Musca (Latin for 'fly') is a small constellation in the deep southern sky. It was one of twelve constellations created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman, first appearing on a 35-cm (14 in) diameter celestial globe by Plancius and Jodocus Hondius published in 1597 or 1598 in Amsterdam. The first depiction in a celestial atlas was in Johann Bayer's Uranometria of 1603. Musca remains below the horizon for most Northern Hemisphere observers. Many of the constellation's brighter stars are in the Scorpius–Centaurus Association, hot blue-white stars that appear to share a common origin and motion across the Milky Way. These include Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Zeta² and (likely) Eta Muscae, as well as HD 100546, a blue-white Herbig Ae/Be star that is surrounded by a complex debris disk containing a large planet or brown dwarf and possible protoplanet. Two further star systems have been found to have planets. The constellation also contains two Cepheid variables visible to the naked eye. Theta Muscae is a triple star system, the brightest member of which is a Wolf–Rayet star. (Full article...)

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Juan Orlando Hernández

Sebastián Piñera is elected President of Chile for a second time.
In the United States, an Amtrak Cascades passenger train derails in DuPont, Washington, killing three people and injuring more than seventy others.
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December 21: December solstice (16:28 UTC, 2017); Yule

Antonov An-225 carrying the Buran shuttle

1124 – Lamberto Scannabecchi was elected Pope and took the name Honorius II.
1826 – Settlers from the United States in Mexican Texas made the first attempt to secede from Mexico, establishing the short-lived Republic of Fredonia.
1937 – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length cel-animated feature in film history, premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles.
1988 – The world's largest aircraft, the Antonov An-225 Mriya (pictured), made its first flight.
2012 – Countries that were part of the Maya civilization celebrated the end-date of a 5,126-year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.

Hugh, Margrave of Tuscany (d. 1001) · Thomas Wriothesley, 1st Earl of Southampton (b. 1505) · Jane Fonda (b. 1937)

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Peter and Paul Fortress is the original citadel of St. Petersburg, Russia, founded by Czar Peter the Great in 1703 and built to Domenico Trezzini's designs from 1706 to 1740. Through the early 1920s, it was used as a prison and execution ground by the Bolshevik government. Since then, it has been adapted as the central and most important part of the State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, which occupies most of the fortress building save the structure occupied by the Saint Petersburg Mint.

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