Captain Picard Day

June 16th is Captain Picard Day. Be sure to remember the great Jean-Luc Picard on this very important day.

Captain Picard Day is mentioned in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Pegasus”. Late in the episode the stardate mentioned, 47457.1, is equivalent to June 16th. In order to facilitate things this date is used as the official date of Captain Picard Day, though technically the date should actually fall a few days earlier. The events of Captain Picard Day take place at the very begining of the episode and an undeterminted amount of time passes from that time in the episode until the time when the star date is mentioned. The Enterprise has to rendezvous with the Crazyhorse, go to the asteroid field, and then spend 8 hours scanning for the Pegasus. I approximated this time at being a minimum of 1 day earlier and probabaly in the whereabouts of 3 days earlier, putting it around June 13th.

That being said, there are a number of online sources which simply quote Captain Picard Day as being June 16th. Because most people just pick the Stardate from the episode and go by that. I expect no less from the average Internet type.

That being said I would expect more from the writters of Star Trek: Enterprise, though this confidence is apparently underserved. As the unfortunate among us may know the final episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, “These Are the Voyages…”, features a sort of flash forward to scenes with Commander Riker in parallel to the events of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Pegasus”. Early in “These Are the Voyages…” Commander Riker states the stardate as being the same as the date mentioned in “The Pegasus”. This is of course impossible as an absolute minimum of 8 hours has passed, more like a few days, between the two times at which the stardates are mentioned.

All this being said, it was just easier to say it’s on the 16th. So happy Captain Picard Day! Maybe it moves around like Easter so it’s okay that we got it close enough.

For this year’s Captain Picard Day I got together with some friend and played Star Trek BINGO while watching some of our favourite episodes. Just go to this page and print out a card. Refresh the page and it will give a new random card and you can reprint it.

Here are some pictures of the Captain Picard Day fun:

Now listen to the Captain Picard song!

Or better yet, watch it!