Awoooo! I hope you all are enjoying the full moon! I sure am, hoho!
Today I’d like to indulge a bit in astronomy to explore the wondrous moons that accompany our planet.
As I’m sure you are aware, Feral has no less than three moons. Let’s take a look at them one by one!
First up is the blood moon, Astoria. It is always red in color, and I’ll give a possible explanation as to why that is! You see,
This is what we would call a ‘’lunar eclipse’’! The moon is positioned in the earth’s or in this case, Feral’s or another planet’s shadow.
The light from the sun is bends around the planet, and is reflected on the surface of the moon! Because the light is scattered, its color changes to the well known blood red. This phenomenon is called ‘’Rayleigh scattering’’, and is also the reason why the sky appears blue!
If this is indeed the case for Astoria, that would mean is is eternally stuck in a planet’s shadow, since it always appears red. How frightening! Or romantic, since the red coloring is essentially all sunrises and sunsets across the whole world reflected on the moon. Wowza!
Let’s take a look at Visoria next.
Visoria is the blue, moon, which is a phrase some of you might be familliar with: Once in a blue moon. That blue moon, however, does not in and of itself appear blue, but is rather the second full moon that appears in a callendar month, as will be the case on Halloween this year.
Visoria, on the other hand, is actually blue, so how is that happening?
The moon can in fact appear blue if the atmosphere is filled with dust or smoke particles! They have to be wider than 900nm, though.
This is called ‘’Mie scattering’’, and can for example happen after a dust storm, forest fire or a volcanic eruption.
Because of the size of the dust particles, the angle at which the light is scattered changes, thus also changing the color.
Simply AMAZING, right?!
Finally, there is Attis, the infamous broken, and largest moon of Feral.
There have been rumors going around that it got destroyed in interstellar warfare, but i’ll have to sift through my history book collection to confirm that.
In the meantime, lets look at why Attis appears so big, and why it is yellow:
There are several reasons why things can appear big: They are either very large by nature, or they are very close. For example, the earth’s moon can become a super moon when it is the closest to the earth in its orbital period.
Both are probably true for Attis! It is likely a very big moon that orbits feral very closely.
Then why does it appear yellow? you might think yellow is the ‘’default’’ color for a moon, but the earth’s moon is in fact, white. The reason why it can appear yellow, and by extention, Attis appears yellow is because of the same principle as with the other colors: the scattering of light.
Could the atmosphere of Feral actually be fairly polluted? Oh dear...!
The scattering of light sure does seem to indicate so, but luckily us sparks are unbothered by such a thing, hoho!
There is much more to say about the illusterous moons of Feral, but i’ll save that for some other time. Thank you for reading!
