Indigo gift card by Charles Peale

by Van Wymelenberg
April 07, 2010
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Hi. Some very interesting and talented people hang out here at Indigo Night. Our business has a seasonal component to it. We sell the print through several catalogs – Signals and SkyMall – and order volume through these partners is heavy around Christmas when more catalogs are in hand.

Because of this seasonality we hire on extra help from October through January. We’re in Charlottesville, Virginia – a University town. That would be the University of Virginia. So our “help” is often of that community. Graduate students and Post Docs between grants… that kind of thing. One year we had an actual Rocket Scientist work for us, no kidding. This was an Astro Physicist who was waiting for telescope time at the Green Bank radio telescope near here. He was also in queue for NASA astronaut training. It’s a little weird hiring people who have (vastly) greater depth of knowledge than I do. I’m very much an amateur really, when it comes to astronomy, but I certainly have all the knowledge I need to do the print. Cosmology and Black Holes really don’t come into play in naked-eye astronomy.

Sorry, I’m kind of off track here. About the gift card. We have an illustrator who works here several days a week doing framing… it’s a pleasant place to work, and I suppose that’s part of what keeps him here. Another example of the over qualified at Indigo Night. He’s pretty busy with his illustration business, but likes framing, and keeps making time for us. Thank you Charles!

He noticed that our last gift card, based on the ‘Pillars of Creation’ image from Hubble, was looking a little old. We’ve been using it for several years. (I think that star forming region actually is billions of years old. Hmmm. Is that what he meant?).

Anyhow, he worked us something completely different, and I just love it. It’s a digital collage, very vibrant, colorful, and somehow, very much of the night and stars. Here it is:

Under A Summer Sky digital collage by Charles Peale

Next time you ask us to include a gift card your message will either by printed or hand written into one these cards (depending on the penmanship of the digital artist who is working on your order).

Many are called.

by Van Wymelenberg
April 06, 2010
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It’s the crescent moon I’ve been thinking about and watching lately. I’m always filled with a familiar sense of wonder, month after month, year after year, when I watch the crescent moon in the pre-dawn sky as it moves from last quarter to new. Each morning the crescent arc is thinner, and the moon has moved about a half a constellation east, closer to the horizon where the sun will soon rise. Last night was last quarter. Tomorrow I’ll see the crescent arc.

The thing that so persistently fascinates me about the crescent moon, when it’s near new is the transition from waning crescent to new, and then to waxing crescent, over three or four days at the end / beginning of the lunar cycle. Positionally the moon had moved 30° or 40° along the arc of its orbit around earth. In those three days it’s visibility had changed from morning twilight to evening twilight…. because it was now on the other side of the sun.

It’s this physical and emotional affirmation of an abstract science concept, known and understood since grade school in it’s most rudimentary form, that thrills me. The moon waxes. The moon wanes. You can really understand it in your bones when you observe this magical transformation: how the earth turns, how the sun rises and tracks across the sky, and how the moon passes from west to east of the sun. “They’re all in the same plane. They’re all going around in the same direction… It’s perfect, you know. It’s gorgeous. It’s almost uncanny” to quote astronomer Geoffrey Marcy. Our beautiful dance to the music of the spheres.

A fascination with the moon in its daily transition often leads my thoughts to the calendar. The lunar cycle has been the organizing principle of many calendars. But it’s always been at odds with the unit of time we call a ‘day’ – local noon to local noon, our intrinsic unit of division, when the sun touches the zenith – and the tropical or solar year, the time it takes the earth to make one complete orbit of the sun. These cycles don’t just don’t mesh. None of the units are divisible by whole numbers. A lunar month is 29.5306 days. A solar year is 265.243 days. There are 12.368 lunar months in a solar year. A lot of early calendars – those of the Babylonians, the Greeks, the early Romans – were lunar at the core, with corrections that would align the lunar cycle with the solar year, in order to keep the seasons positioned correctly.

The Egyptians had a purely solar calendar. 12 months of 30 days, plus 5 days at the end (or was it the beginning?) of the year. Three weeks of 10 days each month. This calendar used the first sighting of Sirius in the pre-dawn sky to mark the beginning of the year. This named the time to prepare for the floods, when the Nile would bring its rich loam to the plains. Each ten days a new group of stars, one of a group of 36 Decan stars, would be sighted and noted, and so the year progressed in Egypt. Three seasons: flood, sow, and reap.

I think about that person, that Egyptian astronomer priest straining at first light for the first glimpse of Sirius, the weight of that moment. I wonder about their eyesight. I wonder if that person had a sharp eyed child to help. Or was it a group of priests, working together? Did they drink coffee? When did coffee get invented? Did they know the trick of looking near the anticipated location the star… because our peripheral (averted) vision is better at picking up those dim objects than our direct vision?

Back to the early Romans… the Calends, from the Latin Kalendae, meaning “the called,” corresponds to the first day(s) of each month of the lunar calendar. This is the derivation of our word ‘calendar.’ Like the Egyptian who called out the heliacal rising of Sirius, the Romans had a astronomer priest who ‘called out’ the first sighting of the crescent moon in evening twilight, and thus marked the beginning of a new month. I’ll be watching, and report back to you.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

by Van Wymelenberg
March 12, 2010
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Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

To all things there is an appointed time, and a time to
        everie purpose under the heaven.
A time to be borne, and a time to dye: a time to plant, and
        a time to plucke up that, which is planted.
A time to slay, and a time to heale: a time to breake
        downe, and a time to buylde.
A time to wepe, and a time to laugh: a time to mourne, and
        a time to dance.
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones: a
        time to embrace, and a time to be farre from embracing.
A time to seke, and a time to lose: a time to kepe, and a
        time to cast away.
A time to rent, and a time to sowe: a time to kepe
        silence, and a time to speake.
A time to love, and a time to hate: a time of warre. And a
        time of peace.

Over the years some really beautiful quotes have found their way from the Bible to the night sky print. This is not an appropriate forum to discuss religion and natural philosophy, so I won’t go there at all. But whatever your feeling with regard to the sacred, you can’t deny the beauty, as literature or poetry, of this text. Here are a few of my favorites.

Psalm 19

The heavens declare the glory of God; The skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; Night after night they display knowledge.

Wisdom 8:14

For when gentle silence enveloped everything, and night was midway of her swift course, Your all powerful Word leaped down from heaven, from the royal throne.

Isaiah 40:26

Lift up your eyes and look to the Heavens, who created all these? He who brings out the starry host, one by one, and calls them each by name. Because of His great love, not one of them is missing.

Ecclesiastes 7:24

That which is, is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out?

Psalm 147

He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.

Ephesians 4:2

Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.

Philippians 2:2

…then make my joy complete by having the same love, being one in Spirit and purpose.

Romans 12:10

Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.

Ephesians 5:31

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one flesh.

Ecclesiastes 9:9

Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this life that God has given you under the sun.

Ruth 1:16

Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.

1 Corinthians 13:4

Love is patient, love is kind. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Tobit 8:9

Be kind enough…and bring us to old age together.

Song of Songs 5:2

I slept but my heart was awake.

1 Corinthians 13:13

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

New horizon: City lake

by Van Wymelenberg
March 11, 2010
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We just worked up a new horizon illustration: City lake. It’s based on the area of Wind Point, Wisconsin. A customer called us and asked for help finding something in our catalog that was evocative of this area — along the shore of Lake Michigan, populated, but still with a rural feel. We didn’t have anything that we felt was a close match, and so, as per our standing offer, we developed a horizon and added it to the catalog to fill this specific need. We even added the lighthouse at Wind Point for her, although this will not show up in the horizon viewer on the order page.

A bright gibbous moon lights west in the midnight sky with Gemini’s stellar brace, Castor and Pollux, just below, and Saturn with Regulus – heart of the Lion – above, an exceptionally close and beautiful pairing in Leo.

A quote from Jung

by Van Wymelenberg
March 10, 2010
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We are born in a given moment, in a given place and, like vintage wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Carl Jung

This quote came through for an order the other day. A print for someone’s birth sky. I’ve been looking for this quote for a while. I think I first came across it when I was reading Man and His Symbols. That’s the book every college student (in the Fine Arts at least… ok, probably not Engineering) was reading in the 60s and 70s. That, and Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces. I mentioned Jung in our brief text concerning the birthday night sky print, and I’ve always wanted the exact reference. I wonder about the guy getting this print, if he’s really of the ‘age’ he was born. As I recall, he was born in 1964. So, 46 this year. That’s really about the time we settle comfortably into who we are.

That’s the fun and strange part of my job, thinking about you all. What moments are you remembering? These quotes. Our night sky prints with these quotes. How are they meaningful, clever, fun or touching? To whom? And all the walls where the prints hang, the homes, the lives. Who reads them… maybe pausing, pondering, drink in hand, at some kind of party, somewhere. Nebraska? California? what are they thinking, what are they saying as they turn to the person next to them?