Summer Solstice: NIGHT Releases in Two Weeks

Even the solar system is aligning with the launch of my book in two weeks! NIGHTs are getting longer. Today, the summer solstice is the longest day of the year. From here on, the nights will gain time and become longer. That means NIGHT is coming on July 7.

NIGHT is a children’s nonfiction picture book about Nicholas Copernicus, the famous astronomer who developed the idea of heliocentrism, or the idea that the sun is at the center of the solar system. But do you know WHY he was worried about this?

Copernicus and the Calendar Problem

During Copernicus’s time, the calendar was out of whack. The church relied on the calendar to schedule their holidays such as Easter, saint’s days, and Christmas. A year—the time it takes Earth to revolve around the sun—is 365 days, PLUS eleven minutes. Over centuries, those eleven minutes had added up and the church’s celebration of Easter was off by ten days. After Copernicus’s death Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar which added Leap Days and Leap Years to even things out. To catch up and correct the calendar, in 1582, when the new calendar was adopted, you went to sleep on October 4, 1582 and woke up on October 15, 1582.

Copernicus, though, was trying to understand why there was a ten-day gap. If the Earth was the center of the solar system, he couldn’t get the math to work out. Actually, math was his big focus. We think of him as an astronomer, but in thirty years, he only made about 100 recorded observations. Not so many. Partly, he was a busy man with his cleric work. But in a practical way, much of his work was math, figuring out how to explain through numbers what he had observed.

I’ve read his book, On The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and the first chapters are easy to understand. (You should try it! There are several versions available online, including one with an introduction by Stephen Hawking. I chose a clean translation without extras so you can dive straight into Copernicus's own words. Download a translated version of his work here.

But he quickly moves to complicated mathematics to prove his theories, much harder for me to understand!

Peter Willis's Amazing Illustrations

Peter Willis brilliantly illustrates children's books from his home in Great Britain. 

Turning an astronomer's mathematical life into visual storytelling was no small challenge. To bring the story to life, illustrator Peter Willis, had to do historical research about Frombork Cathedral.

I had traveled to Poland and offered photos, but in Copernicus’s time, the cathedral was about half the size. Still, it’s located on a lagoon on the Baltic Sea, and that setting was still accurate. Insert my photo of the cathedral.

Peter uses a digital collage method, creating small files of a character or object and reusing them by enlarging, shrinking, twisting, flipping or otherwise manipulating the files.

Here, each planet or star is a separate file that Peter layers onto a background to create the completed image.

The Night Sky of Arkansas

Last year, my husband and I camped at Mount Magazine State Park in Arkansas, an area designated as a Dark Sky Place (darksky.org). While we were there, the moon was just a sliver and didn’t come out in the early evening, leaving us with a dark, dark sky. Walking around the campground at night, I was shocked at how the dark—the night—swallowed up the puny light of my flashlight.

We went out late to capture some images of the northern lights. Truly a fascinating NIGHT.

As the nights begin to lengthen tomorrow, I'm counting down the 16 days—NO, the 16 nights—until the book launches.

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