Winter Sky

Joe Liles, standing next to the cupola on top of Watts Hall.

Winter Sky

1983

This print denotes what you might see at night if you laid down on your back in a field surrounded by trees and looked up at a clear sky. I worked with the Physics teacher, John Kolena, on this one. John helped me get a view of the sky showing the constellations one might see on my birthday, January 25th every year. The sky is usually clearer in the cold, lower humidity of the winter months. John helped me understand that different stars burn with different colors based on the temperature at which they burn. He taught me about the orientation of the visible edge of our Milky Way galaxy. He taught me about the path of our moon across the sky and that the moon can have halos of two different diameters depending on the particles in our atmosphere. Water vapor produces a halo of a small circle, and ice crystals produce a halo of a larger circle. With this print being a scene of a January sky, I chose the larger ice crystal halo. I have to admit that I enlarged the stars and the moon for the visual effect I was striving to create for the viewer.