How many days and weeks until July 21st?

Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon at 02:56 GMT on July 21st 1969, which was 3.56 in the morning British Summer Time. He said that it was one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind. He always maintained he had said ‘for a man’ and that the article was lost somewhere in a quarter of a million miles of radio; the recordings have never settled it. Aldrin followed nineteen minutes later and called the view magnificent desolation.

The audience is usually put at around 600 million, roughly a sixth of the people then alive. The pictures were received by dish aerials in Australia and relayed on, a chain that accounts for the graininess of the first images. In Britain the BBC stayed on air through the night with Cliff Michelmore, James Burke and Patrick Moore.

The Tate Gallery opened at Millbank on July 21st 1897, built on the site of a demolished prison and paid for by Henry Tate, the Liverpool sugar refiner, who had bought the British rights to a German patent for cutting sugar into cubes. Its formal name was the National Gallery of British Art, but nobody called it that, and in 1932 the name everybody used became official.

The lowest natural air temperature ever recorded on Earth, minus 89.2 degrees Celsius, was measured at the Soviet Vostok station in Antarctica on July 21st 1983.

Born on July 21st: star sign, birthstone and birth flower

Ernest Hemingway and Robin Williams — both named above — share this star sign with everyone else born in the same window.

None of this is settled fact in the way the history above is — zodiac dates, birthstones and birth flowers are conventions rather than laws, and different sources hedge them slightly differently. The birthstone is the most standardised of the three (set by the trade in 1912 and revised since); the birth flower is the least, resting on Victorian tradition rather than any governing body.

Gift ideas for a July 21st birthday

A small, themed starting point rather than a shopping list — ruby for the stone, Cancer for the sign, and the sky itself on the day.

July birthstone necklace

A simple pendant in the actual July birthstone colour, from a long-running UK jewellery brand.

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Cancer constellation necklace

Stainless steel, sign selectable at checkout — choose Cancer for a July 21st birthday.

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Personalised birth flower & birthstone disc

Engraved with a name, the July birthstone and the larkspur — both in one pendant, in a gift box.

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Personalised star map print

The actual night sky over a chosen place on July 21st, whichever year — a print rather than jewellery.

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