How many days and weeks until November 17th?

Mary I died early on November 17th 1558 and her half-sister became queen at twenty-five. Accession Day was kept for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign as a holiday with bell-ringing, bonfires and a tournament at Whitehall, and the habit outlasted her by more than a century: churchwardens’ accounts show parishes still paying their ringers for the seventeenth of November well into the 1700s. Few English monarchs have managed a popular anniversary that survived them.

The Suez Canal opened on November 17th 1869 after ten years of digging, cutting the voyage from London to Bombay by several thousand miles. Verdi’s Aida is often said to have been written for the ceremony. It was not; it was commissioned for the Cairo opera house and first performed two years later.

Lunokhod 1 rolled off its lander onto the Sea of Rains on November 17th 1970, the first wheeled vehicle to work on another world. Built for three months, it lasted nearly eleven. On the same day Douglas Engelbart was granted the American patent for an X-Y position indicator for a display system. The patent ran out in 1987, just as the mouse was becoming universal.

Peter Cook was writing Beyond the Fringe as an undergraduate, and later kept Private Eye alive with his own money. He was born in Torquay on November 17th 1937, Martin Scorsese, the director behind some of American cinema’s most acclaimed films, in 1942, and Danny DeVito, the actor and director known equally for comedy and character roles, in 1944.

Born on November 17th: star sign, birthstone and birth flower

Peter Cook and Martin Scorsese — 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 November 17th birthday

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

November birthstone necklace

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

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Scorpio constellation necklace

Stainless steel, sign selectable at checkout — choose Scorpio for a November 17th birthday.

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Personalised birth flower & birthstone disc

Engraved with a name, the November birthstone and the chrysanthemum — 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 November 17th, whichever year — a print rather than jewellery.

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