Both e-book-versions of Sun and Moon / Sonne und Mond are now available for preorder on Amazon and iBooks/iTunes respectively. You can also download a sample of the e-book on iBooks. Unfortunately, Amazon allows neither a preview nor the downloading of a sample during preorder. If you would like to take a look at some sample pages from the print version instead, you can do that here.
“Kids these days, eh? Always wandering around with their noses in their iPhones, up to no good. Well, maybe not. Because lots of them are using an app called Wattpad which might just be the biggest revolution in reading you’ve never heard of.”
—David Gaughran, What’s Up With Wattpad, 2012
Any Wattys here? I have to admit I had been one of the people who had never heard of Wattpad until a little while ago. When I took a closer look though, I sort of liked the idea. A platform not only for reading but also for writing and sharing. And while there certainly is a lot of teen and fan fiction on Wattpad, they also provide access to thousands of Project Gutenberg’s eBooks.
I am not really sure yet if Wattpad makes sense for the kind of books I publish: not so text-heavy but with a lot of photographs. And most Wattys read on their cell phones while I think cell phone screens way too small to really enjoy my photographs. Also, when I publish eBooks, they have a fixed layout and are not reflowable. But as Wattpad lets you insert photos, I decided to give it a try anyway. And to find out what Wattys think about my stories and if they will follow me on my journeys through the skies…
I have started with uploading chapters from Skies/Himmel and more will follow. If you’d like to take a look, you can check it out here:
“A book cover is a distillation, a haiku, if you will, of the story.”
Chip Kidd at TED2012
I had a hard time with this cover, more specifically with the cover image. As the title of my book was going to be Sun and Moon, I naturally wanted both the Sun and the Moon on the book cover. While we usually observe the Sun during daytime and the Moon during nighttime, it is actually possible to see them both during the day. However, at and around new moon we most of the time cannot see the Moon as the Sun is not able to illuminate it. And at full moon, the Moon only rises at sunset and sets at sunrise. So I was hoping to catch a Crescent Moon and the Sun together. But I had to find out that either when both orbs were visible they were too far apart for a cover image or it was too cloudy to even see them.
Then I thought an aurora picture with the Moon in it would work too as the solar wind causes the polar lights. If you have followed my aurora adventure though, you know that this did not happen either. I missed the only chance I got for this picture on my first night in Yellowknife as I had traveled since the early morning hours and was simply too cold and tired to stay up any longer for the shot. The next night was too cloudy for any picture and afterwards the Moon was too far away from the lights for a cover shot.
I started to get desperate. Unexpected help arrived, however, in the form of my foreword author Daniel Reisenfeld. Dan is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Montana and an absolute expert when it comes to the sky. I am deeply grateful that he not only wrote the foreword for Sun and Moon but also provided a lot of insights and thereby helped making the book more accurate. In his foreword he shared what profound impact the first solar eclipse he observed had on him, back when he was still in high school. When I read his foreword, it just hit me: a solar eclipse image! That was to be my cover image.
So what you see on the cover of Sun and Moon is an image from the August 21, 2017 solar eclipse over North America. The bite taken out of the Sun in the lower left corner is the New Moon partly covering the disc of the Sun at the end of the eclipse. I am really happy with this cover image. Experts on Sun and Moon will know right away what they are looking at and people not so familiar with these two orbs will hopefully get a little curious and take a closer look. Open the book. Read Dan’s foreword, look at the pictures, and maybe want to follow me on …another inspiring and informative journey through the world above.
When I started out photographing skies, I tried to capture the atmosphere of a certain sky-moment, the feeling I had when looking at the sky right there and then. I was fascinated by clouds and the structures they formed. Back then, I avoided having any luminaries in my pictures. I felt that any bright objects would dominate the photographs and distract from what I wanted to show.
But lately I experimented with incorporating the Sun and the Moon into my photographs. And I also became curious about these orbs. Why does the Sun rise and set farther north in the northern hemisphere in summer? What are the darker and the brighter areas on the Moon’s surface? What happens during solar and lunar eclipses? And then these fascinating light displays, the aurora polaris or polar lights. What are they and what does the Sun have to do with them? So I did some research on Sun and Moon and some of the small and big solar and lunar events.
Slowly but steadily my new book Sun and Moon / Sonne und Mond emerged. It will be published in early December. I learned a lot along the way, about photography, astronomy, software, the publishing industry. While the road has been bumpy sometimes, I enjoyed working on this project a lot. I will share more in the next few weeks, so stay tuned!
