607 12th recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet
1519 Hernán Cortés lands in Mexico
1697 - Spanish conquest of Guatemala; Nojpetén (Tayasal), capital of the Itza Maya kingdom, fell to Spanish conquistadors.
1759 27th recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet
1781 William Herschel sees what he thinks is a "comet" but is actually the discovery of the planet Uranus
1835 Charles Darwin departs Valparaiso for Andes crossing
1921 Mongolia (formerly Outer Mongolia) declares independence from China
1930 Clyde Tombaugh announces discovery of Pluto at Lowell Observatory
1969 - Apollo Program: NASA launches Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth after testing the lunar module.
1988 - The Seikan Tunnel, the world's longest sub-aqueous tunnel (53.85 km) between the Japanese islands of Honshū and Hokkaidō opens.
1992 - A magnitude 6.8 earthquake kills over 500 in Erzincan, eastern Turkey.
2003 - The journal Nature reports that 350,000-year-old footprints of an upright-walking human have been found in Italy.
