To the Moon Alice!!!!!

I don't know if this has been suggested before, but how about having the moon (when it appears ) cycle through its various stages.

Might give the SL Were-beasts & furries a break.

A few astronomical assumptions about Lindenworld:
1. The "planet" is flat.
2. The planet does not rotate since the stars do not move.
3. The sun and moon are equidistant from the planet and each complete one orbit per Linden day.
4. The sun and moon are always on opposite sides of the planet from each other.

Because of this, from the point of view of a ground-based observer, the moon is always getting the sun square in the face and phases would not make sense. In order to have phases the moon would have to orbit independently of the sun, the sun would have to remain relatively "fixed", and much much farther away, and the planet would have to rotate. Or so it seems to me.

I'm pretty sure the stars do move, and why the all the excuses?! It's SL we can do what we want!

It woudl be nive eyecandy! Put it on the bottom of the list! Yes even AFTER havok 2!

So how do you explain the moon turning into a jack-o-lantern, or a shamrock, or a heart with an arrow through it, huh?

Maybe they could take an open source program like Celestia (or Kstars) and extract a screen shot from it every day or so (it would seem to be overkill to do this real-time, but the source is there to make that possible too). That program positions not only the moon and planets properly, but also several thousand stars, galaxies, and even visible man-made satelites. It would be kinda neat to look up at the sky in SL and know that it was almost identical to the real thing. Getting the aspect ratio might be tricky.

I endorse this idea/feature. Would be cool to see more sky reactions.

What annoys me about the moon (and sun) is that its reflection in the water seems to be totally wrong, in terms of perspective. It just looks wrong. It's really obvious when the moon is rising or setting. The reflection is not a shadow. Reflections on flat surfaces do not stretch. They do shimmer and are usually somewhat translucent, at least on water.

and aw, here I thought it was a Honeymooners thread....

fen-

Edmund got it right. The sky looks so fake. Give us a better sky Lindens!

i agree a more realistic starscape would be great..

BUT..

i disagree about kstars, cool idea, but SL should not have the same stars as Earth.. it should have it's own set of stars..

what would be cool is this:

explicit starscape, exclusive to SL.. with constellations and everything we love about the RL night sky.. just different.
THEN we, the players, could map out the sky! define constellations! have a central database for what constellations are defined/named. with a way to submit new ones!

as far as the sun and moon go.. leave them alone. Julian made an excellent point.. they are always facing directly opposite each other, therefore it makes sense that there wouldn't be moon phases. but that's not really a big deal if you don't want it to be.. i would prefer it follow some rules though.


(yay for me, just reached post number: information (411) )

I know this is a year old but oh well

Well, Julian hasnt made a point. If the moon and sdun are directly opposite, how would ANY light get to the moon? Seems to me that we would always have no moon, or at least not be able to see it. So what if the sun and moon are opposte, it's wrong now so why not make phases?

Nah. Let us build are own skyboxes, cloud layer textures, and heavenly bodies, Lindens. Add it as a milestone to the new rendering engine or something.

Sometimes, I think Torque spoiled me.

<pedantic><silly>Were this true in RL, every full moon would be eclipsed. Every RL full moon is not eclipsed. Ergo, the SL system could be structured so that the moon was never eclisped.</silly></pedantic>

Malachi is correct. In the real world the earth receives sunlight even during a total solar eclipse because the positions of the bodies involved are such that the moon appears slightly smaller than the sun when it passes between. It's the same as holding a coin in front of a lightbulb at arm's length versus holding the coin right in front of your eye.

In the real world the sun and moon also "move" independently of each other. In SL they can be visualized as sitting on opposite sides of a merry-go-round with the Linden "planet" as the non-rotating axle in the center. If the stars appeared to move we could be living at the center of a celestial sphere in which all the heavenly bodies revolved around us, or we might assume they are stationary and it is only Lindenworld that rotates. However, the stars do not move (though they do twinkle) and so we know our world and the stars are fixed and it is the sun and moon that move.

The size of the world must be such that it appears smaller than the sun to an observer on the moon and so the moon receives light from the sun and we have a perpetual full moon. Of course, the real reason the moon appears bright is because it is self-lit and doesn't depend on the sun at all.

Rather than lobby for a celestial system that mirrors the real world I would ask for the abolishment of night altogether since our world does not need to be a slave to its astronomic neighbors like the real earth does.

I agree with giving SL its own sky, rather than just a duplicate of ours. Actually, I favor a double star system to support the fact that the day is so much longer than the night. And I'd like to see the sun(s) and moon(s) not locked into phase with each other, to allow for phasing of reflective bodies (moon(s)).

And seasons, so the stellar objects don't rise and set in the same places all the time... though there's no reason at all for the seasons to match those anywhere on Earth.

Then we could really build stonehenge and figure out how it all works.

neko