Tag Archives: night

Things we’ve lost: The Night Sky

A month or two back we went to Jaisalmer and spent a night in the desert. The dunes were nice, but most fascinating was falling asleep to a real, starry, clear night sky. It’s only when taken out of the intense light of the city that you realize how the stars have been lost to us.

Rio by Night

Cohen’s method is original and precise and harkens back to the methodologies employed by early 19th century photographers like Gustave Le Grey.  He photographs the world’s major cities, seeking out views that resonate for him and noting the precise time, angle, and latitude and longitude of his exposure.  As the world rotates around its axis the stars that would have been visible above a particular city move to deserts, plains, and other places free of light pollution.  By noting the precise latitude and angle of his cityscape, Cohen is able to track the earth’s rotation to places of atmospheric clarity like the Mojave, the Sahara, and the Atacama desert.  There he sets up his camera to record what is lost to modern urban dwellers.

via Thierry Cohen – Artists – Danziger Gallery.

The two sleeps or They myth of the 8 hour rest

Much like the experience of Wehr’s subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

“It’s not just the number of references – it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch says.

During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.

And these hours weren’t entirely solitary – people often chatted to bed-fellows or had sex.

A doctor’s manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day’s labour but “after the first sleep”, when “they have more enjoyment” and “do it better”.

via bbc.co.uk

Up until the 17th century, people in Europe tended to sleep in two cycles, a first short cycle of a few hours, followed by a period of wakefulness, then followed by another period of sleep.

Read the full article at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16964783