For photographer Travis Novitsky, capturing images of the night sky has been a decades long journey. "I've been a photographer for most of my life," says Novitsky. "I've been shooting very avidly for over 25 years and had a focus on the night sky for at least 20 years."
Between the eye-catching visuals, the new book Spirits Dancing: The Night Sky, Indigenous Knowledge, and Living Connections to the Cosmos (with photography by Novitsky and text by Annette S. Lee) explores the science side of the sky while also paying a lot of attention to the spiritual connections to the cosmos. "The text really does a good job of bridging the gap between the two," says Novitsky. "As Annette was writing it, she wanted to have me involved in the process just to make sure that it was going the direction that we both wanted... it really was very collaborative over a period of probably a couple years."
Spirits Dancing is available through most booksellers and on various websites. For one brick and mortar location - Drury Lane Books in Grand Marais - it was the best-selling book of 2023.
Minnesota Reads is produced at The North 103.3 with funding provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.
