May 2024: Five Fridays, Auroras and 23 Business Days
May 2024 began on a Wednesday and ended on a Friday, and in between it packed five Wednesdays, five Thursdays and five Fridays. That makes 23 business days, the fullest working month of the second quarter. The sky pitched in: on May 10 and 11 the strongest geomagnetic storm in two decades pushed auroras as far south as Florida and Cuba. A working month, with a light show in the middle.
The numbers under the grid
May 2024 opened on Wednesday, May 1 and closed on Friday, May 31, running 31 days across weeks 18 to 22. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday each appeared five times; Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Saturday four times. That is 23 business days and eight weekend days, the fullest working month of the second quarter.
The moon made five stops: last quarter on Wednesday, May 1, new moon on Wednesday, May 8 and first quarter on Wednesday, May 15. The full moon followed on Thursday, May 23, with a second last quarter on Thursday, May 30. The month opened and closed on the same phase, which the sky does not do on request.
Auroras and machine brains
The geomagnetic storm of May 10 and 11 reached extreme G5, the first since 2003, after a series of coronal mass ejections. Auroras appeared from Tasmania to the northern United States, with sightings as far south as Florida and Cuba.
AI had a busy fortnight. Apple unveiled the M4 iPad Pro on May 7, its thinnest product ever at 5.1 mm. On May 13, OpenAI released GPT-4o, an omni model handling text, vision and audio. For the first time, its top-tier chatbot intelligence became free to every ChatGPT user.
Songs, saddles and silverware
Nemo won Eurovision for Switzerland on Saturday, May 11 with The Code, a first Swiss win since Celine Dion in 1988 and the contest's first nonbinary winner. A week earlier, Mystik Dan had taken the 150th Kentucky Derby by a nose at 18-1 in a three-horse photo finish. May 2024 multitasked.
Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us went to number one in the United States. Bridgerton season 3 topped Netflix's global chart from May 16.
On May 22, Ademola Lookman scored the first hat-trick in a major UEFA final as Atalanta beat Bayer Leverkusen 3-0 in Dublin, ending a 51-match unbeaten run. It was Atalanta's first major trophy in 61 years. Cannes gave its Palme d'Or to Anora on May 25. A day later, Charles Leclerc won his home Monaco Grand Prix, the first Monegasque winner there since 1931.
One story shadowed everything. Floods in Brazil's Rio Grande do Sul, building since late April, became the country's worst climate-related disaster on record. They killed 183 people, affected about 2.3 million and left most of Porto Alegre under water.
May 2024 lined up its five-count weekdays in a row and its auroras over a Friday and Saturday. The month knew where things belonged.