moon time

[marycatelli]

It's a classic of the planetary romance genre, to have a few moons floating about the sky, just so you know it's not Earth.

My hero's kinda figured it out that it was another planet. Something about the foliage being every shade except green. Still, I got him to the open air just after sunset. He can't make out enough stars to tell constellations, which would not tell him much, but there are two moons.

Hmmm. How many moons should there be? Seven? Four? Thirty-two?

In fact, I'm working on two planetary romances. The other one, a story inhabited only by natives of the planet, has twelve moons, I suspect. That will be harder to introduce, since all the points of view take them for granted. Well, except for thinking moonlight lucky. It's a pretty cloudy planet.

Not even going to think about the calendar. Hmmm. Except to note it's a prestige occupation. I wonder if they quarrel over which moon is the proper one to keep time by.

Comments

[nodrog]

Remember that the moons gravitationally interact with each other as well.  The only way that would be stable for any geological length of time is to have them wide apart and not very large.  Even having one orbit the other - say, Phobos or Ceres in orbit around the Moon - would cause wobbles in Earth and Moon (and Ceres) that would not be festive - or stable.

Parenthetically, Isaac Asimov mentioned something fascinating in one of his non-fiction articles:  Venus and Earth are almost identical in size.  If our Moon were orbiting the same quarter-million mile distance from Venus instead (Asimov dubbed the result “Cupid”), it would be plainly naked-eye visible as a bright spark next to and very obviously orbiting our sister planet.  He surmised such obvious evidence that the universe does NOT revolve exclusively around the Earth would put paid to the geocentric conceit from the start.  I doubt that, but it comes to mind now when I see the Morning Star.



Update to add:

               


        Try this instead!

[marycatelli]

I've already decide that some will be small enough to be merely star-like, and others large.

In fact, at one point, a wise old man will point that if every lesser moon were as bright as the greater moons, they could get no sleep of a night, but if every greater moon were as dim as the lesser moon, no one could ever travel by night, not just by the rare nights when all the greater ones had settle. (It's an allegory of human life. 0;)

I remember the Asimov essay. Man, that was stunningly bad. But it was his trying to draw the conclusion that we would be more ecologically aware that really pushed it over the limit.

[nodrog]

One thing he mentioned I hadn't considered, that while we know it full well, yet that the Evening- and Morning Star are the same thing is not intuitively obvious.  The presence of 'Cupid' would certainly make it so.

[He recycled the idea for his 'Black Widowers' story, “Earthset and Evening Star” - the guest that evening was concerned for his wife, who was being drawn into a cult of someone who claimed to be able to astrally project to Mars, which as Bradbury said, was Heaven, and he could see Earth, he said…  and it was Henry the waiter who said, “And what about the Moon?”  The leader never mentioned Earth's visibly obvious and obviously visible companion miniplanet - it hadn't occurred to him!]

[marycatelli]

Well, frequently they aren't the same thing. You can get notices in the newspaper that mention, on top of moonrise and moonset, sunrise and sunset (with civil, nautical, and astronomical twilight), what the morning and evening stars are.