Love and Honey

by Van Wymelenberg
March 05, 2010
1 comments

By the light (not the dark but the light)
Of the silvery moon (not the sun but the moon)
I wanna spoon (not croon, but spoon)
To my honey I’ll croon love’s tune
Honey moon, honey moon, honey moon
Keep a-shinin’ in June
Your silv’ry beams will bring love’s dreams
We’ll be cuddlin’ soon
By the silvery moon
The silv’ry moon…

Here at Indigo Night, a graphic chosen to commemorate a honeymoon is one of the more popular prints. I have noticed that they are usually ordered by the new bride for her adoring husband and a majority of the destinations are somewhere tropical; a place with warm sand, clear water, and a view of some of the more southern constellations such as Crux, the “Southern Cross,” and beautiful Argo Navis (or just Argo), an enormous starry ‘Ship’ made up of constellations Carina, the Keel, Vela, the Sail, Puppis, the Stern, and Pyxis, the Mariner’s Compass.

Looking up these popular locations is one of the favorite parts of my job. I vicariously fly down to these beaches via Google Earth in search of the longitude and latitude coordinates. While reggae is playing on our Pandora station, I click through little blue squares of St. Thomas, Riveria Maya, Ochos Rios, Waikiki and I almost feel like I am there. Almost….

Back to my reality that is the Virginia winter… an order came through recently, remembering a Honeymoon trip to Antigua. The date happened to be for a full moon in March, a moon we call the ‘Sugar Moon.’ (There are many names for the full moon in March: Lenten, Crow, Worm, Crust, Sap, Sugar, Chaste, Death… depending on the culture you’re quoting, but Sugar is our preference.) The Headline for this print read: Our Honey Moon Night.

Hmmm. Sugar Moon on the Honey Moon. I got to thinking… what’s up with ‘honeymoon?’ Is it related to the ‘Honey Moon’?

I always like to start the hunt for derivation with my trusted source, the OED. The Oxford English Dictionary. It defines honeymoon this way: The first month after marriage, when there is nothing but tenderness and pleasure (Samuel Johnson); originally having no reference to the period of a month, but comparing the mutual affection of newly-married persons to the changing moon which is no sooner full than it begins to wane…

The OED often cites Johnson, the English scholar who completed work in 1755 on the first authoritative dictionary of the English language. His dictionary was the gold standard source authority on all things ‘words’ until 1928 when the OED was first published. Johnson was probably quoting an earlier lexicographer, Richard Huloet, who defines the word in his 1552 Abcedarium Anglico-Latinum pro Tyrunculis – the center piece of his Latin-English teaching method…

Hony mone, a terme prouerbially applied to such as be newe maried, whiche wyll not fall out at the fyrste, but thone loueth the other at the beginnynge excedyngly, the likelyhode of theyr exceadynge love appearing to aswage, ye which time the vulgar people cal the hony mone.

(Honeymoon, a term proverbially applied to the newly-married, who will not fall out [argue] at first, but they love the other at the beginning exceedingly, the likelihood of their exceeding love appearing to assuage [make blissfully smooth any disagreement]; this is commonly called the honeymoon.)

The little I’ve read of Huloet indicates he was quite a wit, and that his definitions sometimes tended to be ‘informal.’

None of these early sources tell us the origin of the term. While they do define the term, that definition seems more a wry offering than a hard fact. With no exact derivation available, we are left to speculate…

Perhaps the origin of the word is based upon the practice of the newly married drinking mead (a honey-based drink) during the first month (“moon”) of marriage. Weddings once commonly took place around the time of the solstice – in that small window of time after the crops were in, at the start of the growing season… The drink supposedly increased libido and fertility. Tradition had it that the bride’s family supplied mead to the couple… a wonderful indulgence. A special goblet was given with which to imbibe the mead, and this tradition is still evident today… the wedding goblet.

This is the most common story I find as I root around the usual sources.

Another theory states that ‘honeymoon’ is from the Norse word ‘hjunottsmanathr’ – the practice of ‘kidnapping a bride’ (let’s assume that means elopement) and keeping her from her family until the all important ability to conceive is assured, at which time the marriage can be formalized. I’ve read a few articles that refute this, mostly on the point that the Norse and English language had lost their common ground long before honey moon/honeymoon came into use. Who’s to say?

I’ll offer my own simple theory. A little variation on the mead, but of the mead. Many cultures based their calendars of the cycle of the moon. Each moon had a name that helped define or celebrate a season: when to plant, when to harvest. Think ‘Harvest Moon’ or ‘Moon Before Yule’ or the ‘Budding Moon.’ I know that the ‘Honey Moon’ is a moon that is associated with late spring or early summer, usually the full moon before the summer solstice. I haven’t been able to trace this back to a particular culture, but I’m working on it. The oldest source I find in the 1750 Farmer’s Almanac.

It’s seems so easy… the ‘Honey Moon’ takes place at about the time when honey is first available from the hive, late May or early June. This is also the season of marriage. And, with the availability of honey, a wonderful source of fermentation, mead. So my take is that… as ‘Honey Moon’ was one of the named moons and it marked the time when the sap was running and our friends the bees were in their first honey… and… as this was also the season of love and marriage… sweet as honey, it being all ‘tenderness and pleasure,’ I think ‘Honeymoon’ was associated with each of these, and therefore both of these. (And the mead, well, that too. But mostly love and honey.) And, taking it that last step further, ‘moon’ was commonly word for a period of time, about a month.

Honeymoon, from ‘Honey Moon,’ meaning sweet love at the marrying time. Any thoughts on this? As far as ‘new’ love waxing to ‘fullness’ as the moon does, then inevitably ‘waning’ with familiarity… as stated in the OED, and Johnson. I’ll buy that too. I’ve fallen in love, and I’ve married, and it can’t always be the first blush of love. But the thing about love and the moon is that they somehow always get back to being new, and that’s the interesting part.

(Posted by Van, with Anna)

New horizon: Havana

by Van Wymelenberg
March 03, 2010
0 comments

Just a quick note to let you know we’ve finished the development on our Havana horizon. It’s up and available online.

We’re always looking for horizon ideas… share your thoughts with us by phone at 866-565-4500 or email us thorough the link on the home page.

We are trying to develop China horizons this spring, but are not having much luck tracking down good images. If you have knowledge of a good source for stock images out of China let us know.

The quote on the print, by the way, is from the movie Havana. What a time that must have been.

On the horizon

by Van Wymelenberg
February 22, 2010
0 comments

Hello Indigo blog readers, this is Morgan King interrupting your usual blog author to explain all about making custom horizons for your Indigo Night prints based on your photographs. I’ve been doing the graphic design work for Indigo for many years, and have created lots of unique horizons for our customers in that time. Now Indigo Night is formally offering the service to everyone, so I’m here to explain how it works and what we require to make it happen!

There are several factors to consider when choosing the appropriate photograph for us work with – it can be done from less exacting images, but your satisfaction is more likely from photos that follow as many of these guidelines as possible:

• Photos taken at sunset or sunrise are always the easiest and fastest to work from – it keeps the image from having sharp shadows while still having a distinct separation of earth and sky, which is excellent conditions for digitally extracting the horizon. Night time photos are ok, obviously, and they often have the benefit of having all the lights in the area being turned on, but if the skyline disappears into the dark of night, it can be time consuming to cut it out accurately.

• The horizon part of the image should be as short and wide as possible! Think PANORAMA. The most common difficulty we encounter is the natural tendency to center the image, to ‘fill the frame’ with your subject: that makes for a great photo, but for the night sky print we need room for the sky. The horizon elements should be about 1/5 of the overall print area. It still needs to stretch across the length of the image, too. There’s a lot of ways to massage an image into fitting, but the better fit it is from the start, the better! Back up!

• The photograph should be as large and high resolution as possible. Digital cameras made in the last few years usually take photos that are high enough resolution to work for an Indigo Night print, but small images, such as those taken from cellphone cameras, are usually too small and grainy to be manipulated and printed at a quality that matches the rest of the Indigo print. We don’t require the images to be full print resolution (300ppi), but the larger and higher resolution the image, the better and more quickly the image will be able to be created. At the risk of stating the obvious, the print needs to belong to you.

• Try to choose an image that’s as unpopulated as possible – photographs with a lot of people can be problematic in several ways. Since Indigo Night tries to choose the best possible time in the night to get the moon, planets, and the best constellations visible, the exact time that the print is made for can vary quite a bit, so a photo that was taken
  at 6pm after a wedding might need to be used for a print that has stars from just before midnight, so including people would be pretty incongruous. Another reason not to include people in the photo is that the night sky print has a quiet, still beauty to it, and people frozen in motion can weaken the overall effect and lessen the timeless gracefulness of it. Finally, removing people from an image, while certainly possible, greatly increases the amount of time it takes to create the image!

Keeping those few guidelines in mind, we can work together to create a totally unique skyline! If you have any questions about how this process works or if an image is suitable for a custom horizon, please contact us! Even if the photo you’re dreaming of using doesn’t meet the exact guidelines, that doesn’t mean we can’t give it a shot – we’ve pulled off some amazing transformations in the past! Also, if you have a creative or unique idea you’d like to pursue with your custom horizon, we’re open to discussing unusual requests!

If the photograph seems like a good addition to our catalog we’ll do the development for free. If it’s just going to be for you and you alone, we’ll shoot you a quote based on your photograph. Prices usually fall between $50 and $100, rarely more, and sometimes less, especially if it’s a quick and simple rendering, such as adding your own steeple into one of our existing treelines. (By the way, that’s a really special thing to do for an milestone anniversary gift — if you can track down the steeple from the church where the long married couple tied the knot!)

What's Your Angle on That?

by Van Wymelenberg
February 19, 2010
1 comments

The other day my wife commented on an image of the sun and moon, shown together in the same frame, lovely and amazing, at the north pole. The image was posted on a co-worker’s door. Michelle brought the amazing image home last night at my prompting. Hah. No way.

I did a google image search for ‘sun moon north pole’ to see what I could see on this, and 516,000 images were returned. The first page of results shows how endemic the proliferation of this image is:

I started following the links to see what people were saying about this image. “An amazing picture of the sunset at the northpole. The moon was very close that night. You’ll probably never see another image like this.” seemed to be the most popular caption. It was everywhere.

It was in a lot of inspirational and spiritual blogs. Most remarked on the stark beauty at the pole. It was on a lot of alarmist blogs ("It’s melting, it’s melting). (Well, it is melting, but not quite like this.) And a lot of Political blogs: somehow both the right and left claim it to prove their point of view. A few blogs de-bunked it.

Here is the image, a bit closer:

I traced the image back to fantasy artist Inga Nielsen

A quick look through her gallery shows many, many fantasy images. Strange worlds with their very own celestial mechanics.

Somehow, this particular image was selected as the Astronomy Picture of the Day, NASA’s brilliant and beautiful website, where each day about a zillion people receive via email or by navigation/download at this URL an exceptionally cool image of something to do with space. Each image has a short narrative written by a scientist. And usually several interesting links.

Nielsen’s image was the APOD on June 20th, 2006. I suppose it got passed around, and taken as “real” since the source is legitimate. Hmm. Should have read the caption.

The thing is, by some beautiful quirk of fate, or guiding hand, the sun and moon seem to be the same size in our sky. Astronomers call this the ‘angular size.’ The perceived size of the moon and sun derives from their actual size combined with their actual distance. It’s wild that these two objects’ perceived size are almost identical. Think ‘Solar Eclipse’ – one of nature’s most awe-inspiring moments.

Anyhow, the sun is a fixed point of light, the earth and the moon’s orbits do not vary, so the angular size of the moon and sun, from earth, is constant. These two objects will always appear to be the same size in our sky. This image can only exist in some other world, imagined or real, but not on our home planet.

We love hearing from you!

by Van Wymelenberg
February 17, 2010
0 comments

A few recent emails

Hello Van, I haven’t spoken to my father yet but I was thrilled to receive the following email from him early this morning…

“Thank you both so much for the lovely star map / image. Of course I ran my own computer program and you will glad to know that it is an accurate image of the sky for that date! It really is very handsome, with the bare trees and the lone house, and with Orion in the sky along with the moon and planets. It is a very special birthday present.”

…He is SO hard to buy for, so I am very grateful to you for enabling us to bring him a smile on his milestone 70th birthday.

Happy Holidays, Nora HF [nb: Nora’s father is a retired astronomer. Especially nice to get this note. -Van]

I have received my print and I cannot thank you enough. It is beautiful and perfect in so many ways. The quality and workmanship is amazing and the attention to detail in the horizon just made me catch my breath. This is going to be my husband’s Christmas gift this year and your company surpassed all of my wildest dreams in this print.

Thank you so very much, Paulette L.

Just wanted to let you know that our friends absolutely loved the print! They said it is their favorite gift ever!

Thanks so much! Have a great day! Chrissi C.

Just to let you know the print was a HUGE success. It was perfect… even brought tears to my husband’s eyes. Thank you for working with me and getting to me so quickly. If you ever need a reference or referral… I’m the one.

Debra E.

Have something to add? Post a comment below.