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How to explain Astronomy to people who aren't Astronomy nerds

Vaporo

Inkling
So, the fantasy world that I've been developing for a while now has a bit of odd astronomy to it that ultimately becomes important to the story, and I don't know how to introduce it in good way.

First of all, my story takes place on two tidally locked double planet worlds. If you don't know what the means, they're essentially two earth-like planets that orbit each other every 24 hours, and always have the same side facing the other. Because of this, the opposing planet will appear to float suspended in the same place all the time, depending on where you are in the world. The day/night cycle of the opposing planet would also cause it to go through apparent "phases" every day that significantly light up or darken the surface of the opposing planet depending on time of day and, again, region of the world.

On top of that, there are no stars in my world. I really have no idea what to do with this. How do I describe the lack of something that's never been there and nobody in my story has ever heard of without being intrusive? Do I describe the total blackness of night when the "moon" is in its darkest phase and hope that people catch on? I really don't know what to do here.

So, does anyone have any advice here? I'm not asking anyone to have an advanced understanding of astrophysics. I just want to give a general visual of my world and its night sky without intruding on the story or having an info-dump scene.
 

Aryth

Minstrel
Hmm, good question! Do the characters in your world have a scientific understanding of the nature of their solar system or is it shrouded in myth and legend?
 

Vaporo

Inkling
Somewhere in between. The more scientific minds know that their world is spherical, that the opposing world is similarly spherical, the fact that the two orbit each other, and the approximate distance between the two, but they don't understand the mechanism that drives the orbits or the exact nature of the opposing world. There are other planets in the solar system, but they're unimportant to the story and are pretty much shrouded in mysteries.
 

CupofJoe

Myth Weaver
An origin myth?
A story that the gods made just these to worlds and the sun, and nothing else beyond them.... Things like comets and shooting stars might need a bit of explaining [the gods are still at work building?]
 

Vaporo

Inkling
An origin myth?
A story that the gods made just these to worlds and the sun, and nothing else beyond them.... Things like comets and shooting stars might need a bit of explaining [the gods are still at work building?]

I do have an origin myth like this (short form is that the two gods that built these worlds were kicked out of the pantheon and had limited power on their own, so they couldn't make anything beyond a single solar system), but almost nobody alive remembers it and it gets revealed as the story goes on, and I want the reader to discover it alongside the characters.
 

Aryth

Minstrel
Perhaps your characters could discuss the nature of the planets in a bit of dialogue if it fits into your story. I personally enjoy reading about things like that and think it makes a story interesting, though I understand your desire to avoid info-dumping. Perhaps you could reveal details about it little by little, unless your readers need to know the details early on.
For the starless sky, I like your idea of describing the sky as darkness with just a moon and the other planet and maybe emphasize it's emptiness or something. Maybe there could be a legend of other solar systems that have these things called stars and the characters are puzzled about them.
I don't have very much experience with world building, so I'm just throwing ideas out there.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
If it's not important to the understanding of the story then you don't have to explain anything. You can just describe how the world is and the people will figure it out. If there are no stars then just describe what your characters see when they look up.

It doesn't have to be complicated.
 

Vaporo

Inkling
Well, it is important to the understanding of the story. Certain events can only occur in certain parts of the world because of the angle of the two planets to each other, and the amount of light that reaches a region during the night fundamentally influences how the region works.

I'd like to try and give my reader a rough understanding of this stuff as soon as possible because if the reader has to stop halfway through the story to reimagine everything because I hadn't explained it well enough earlier, then I feel that I haven't done my job as an author.

And the route of "there's a legend of stars" won't work. There are no stars in my world. Even with their combined power, the gods wouldn't be able to create more than a few solitary solar systems. Aside from the sun, not even the gods know what a star is. And my main characters aren't really the types to go around discussing the motions of the heavens, so that route is probably a bust.

I could try describing the emptiness of the sky, but I'm afraid that that would jar readers out of the story, knowing that I added that out-of-place line in there specifically to let them know that there are no stars. But, if I can't think of a better way, that's probably how I'll have to do it, then.
 
She: "Have you ever thought about what you'd do if you were a god?"

He: "No."

She: "Well, if I was a goddess, I'd create my own world and populate it with animals and plants, but no humans."

He: "You're crazy. No humans? Who'd manage the place? And where would you put it? Would we have three planets facing each other instead of two?"

She: "No." She looks up wistfully and points at the emptiness of space. "I'd put it somewhere out there. It would have its own sun. I'd put it far, far away, but you'd still be able to see it from here. A single point of light in the darkness. And every time you looked at it, you'd think of me."

He: "Well, you're my goddess, and you don't need your own planet to make me think of you every second of every day."
 
On top of that, there are no stars in my world. I really have no idea what to do with this. How do I describe the lack of something that's never been there and nobody in my story has ever heard of without being intrusive? Do I describe the total blackness of night when the "moon" is in its darkest phase and hope that people catch on? I really don't know what to do here.

I think that maybe you just describe what is there, and let readers come to understand the implication.

What is there is blackness. They look up; they see nothing but darkness and the other nearby bodies, like the other planet, the moon, and a sun.

But to drive the point home so there's less doubt about the implications, you could use metaphor and/or pseudoscience or mythological tales when you describe what the people see. For instance—and this may be over the top just to drive my point home—they could describe their universe as a black-velvet purse of the Creator-god, where the two planets and moon are like rounded jewels turning against the black velvet when He walks, and the sun is the brilliance coming from His face whenever He opens the purse to check His treasures each day. Hah, don't know why, but black velvet came first to mind when picturing what they might see.

Even if the society has advanced a bit beyond this, so that certain members understand there's a more scientific basis for their solar system, such a myth could linger as an interesting historical tidbit for them, just the way we still know about wrong-headed cosmological ideas from our own past.

Edit: Incidentally, you could have a character recite a poem, or think about the lines of a poem—even a popular song, perhaps!—that will use an evocative metaphor or description of the night sky, if your more general approach is not to be quite so metaphorical, purple, whatever....
 
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skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I'm in the camp that says you don't really have a problem here. Describe what they see. In fact, why don't you try describing it to us? I'm having trouble picturing it, but let me try.

I look up. There's a "moon" in the sky and it is fully lit. Where's the sun? Is it also in the sky? When the moon (I'm going to keep calling it that; your characters will have a name for it) is fully lit, what does it look like? I should think the details of its appearance would be significant to the world.

I look up again. The sun is behind my world, so it's night. What does the moon look like? Since it is eclipsed, it is dark, but is it as dark as the sky? Interesting things happen along the terminator of an eclipse; I should think these features would be important to this world, if not to the actual story.

I look up again. It's a "half-moon". Again I wonder where is the sun in relation to the world and to the moon. What does the moon look like now?

At some point the moon is between the world and the sun. This would be a different sort of night, wouldn't it?

Now look down. In each of these scenarios, what does the world look like when I'm standing in a forest? At sea? In a city? Does the quality of the light change?

Seems to me you have lots of possibilities here. And it wouldn't be much trouble to make it clear that there are only two lights in the sky--Sun and Moon (you'd have your own words, naturally). Two lights, two gods, one of which goes dark from time to time but the other one completely disappears. Custom made for Manicheeism.

Also, wouldn't all the scenarios vary depending where on the planet one was standing? That is the cycle would be different if I lived at the North Pole, at the equator on *this* side versus at the equator on *that* side?
 
Custom made for Manicheeism.

I've been thinking this is custom made for a love poem, where the two planets are a metaphor for two lovers:

My love, do not turn away–
there is no other for you to see
but an angry sun that will burn your heart
and a jealous moon too cold for love
circling and inconstant.
In the darkness I will stay
for you. Do not turn away.

[Yeah, super cliché, but hey, first draft, heh.]
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
Well, it is important to the understanding of the story. Certain events can only occur in certain parts of the world because of the angle of the two planets to each other, and the amount of light that reaches a region during the night fundamentally influences how the region works.

Why can't the text simply state what the region is like and contrast that with a different region and leave it at that? I mean how is this different than having one region be warmer than another? One wouldn't need to explain that one region is closer to the equator or get into the nitty-gritty how stuff like that works would we?

I'd like to try and give my reader a rough understanding of this stuff as soon as possible because if the reader has to stop halfway through the story to reimagine everything because I hadn't explained it well enough earlier, then I feel that I haven't done my job as an author.

The story doesn't have to reveal everything at once, and it's often advisable not to do that. More and more can be revealed as the story unfolds, painting a clearer and clearer picture of the world. The analogy I would use is don't try and force someone to eat a whole cupcake in one bite, they'll choke on it and spit it back out. They'll probably enjoy it more in bite sized chunks.
 

Vaporo

Inkling
I'm in the camp that says you don't really have a problem here. Describe what they see. In fact, why don't you try describing it to us? I'm having trouble picturing it, but let me try.

I look up. There's a "moon" in the sky and it is fully lit. Where's the sun? Is it also in the sky? When the moon (I'm going to keep calling it that; your characters will have a name for it) is fully lit, what does it look like? I should think the details of its appearance would be significant to the world.

I look up again. The sun is behind my world, so it's night. What does the moon look like? Since it is eclipsed, it is dark, but is it as dark as the sky? Interesting things happen along the terminator of an eclipse; I should think these features would be important to this world, if not to the actual story.

I look up again. It's a "half-moon". Again I wonder where is the sun in relation to the world and to the moon. What does the moon look like now?

At some point the moon is between the world and the sun. This would be a different sort of night, wouldn't it?

Now look down. In each of these scenarios, what does the world look like when I'm standing in a forest? At sea? In a city? Does the quality of the light change?

Yes, this is all completely correct, and that's where my problem is coming from. I know exactly how it's going to look. I'm just not sure how I can smoothly convey all of this to readers who may have never thought about light and shadow on planets' surfaces.

Although... Hearing what other people have to say here, I'm starting to think that I wrote myself into a box, and that the problem isn't quite as hard to get around as I was thinking.

I think that my problem with describing the planets' motion really comes from an early scene where a magical event occurs when the "moon" is at a particular point in the sky with a particular shadowing across its surface. It's a worldwide event, so I kind of trapped myself into trying to describe how it looks from every point on the planet and... Yeah, looking at it with fresh eyes it's kind of a mess.

For most of the story I could just give a general description of how the moon looks in each new region and how it changes throughout the day, and drop hints about why its appearance changes throughout so that, when it becomes important at the climax, the reader has a good enough understanding to follow the story.

I'm still not sure what to do about the stars, though. Everything I envision to just feels contrived in the context of my story. My main characters are warriors and kings who aren't really ones to sit around discussing mythology and its relation to the night sky unless it has an effect on battle strategy.

The story doesn't have to reveal everything at once, and it's often advisable not to do that. More and more can be revealed as the story unfolds, painting a clearer and clearer picture of the world. The analogy I would use is don't try and force someone to eat a whole cupcake in one bite, they'll choke on it and spit it back out. They'll probably enjoy it more in bite sized chunks.

I agree with this, but I also don't agree with this. It's fine to fill in small details as the story goes on, yes, but the lack of stars and the gigantic planet floating above the horizon are not small details. If I were reading a book and it wasn't until the twentieth chapter that I learned that the sky was purple the whole time, I'd be kind of annoyed.
 

Trick

Auror
Running with Fifth's poem thought, have you considered an interlude or chapter header that is short segments of a saga or something similar that drops the necessary hints while still being entertaining? I know that's not everyone's cup of tea but that kind of device has always worked for me as a reader when done well. Even journal entries from an advanced scientist who really understands a lot of this could work, as long as their written by a character we can get to know a bit through his writing.
 
I'm still not sure what to do about the stars, though. Everything I envision to just feels contrived in the context of my story. My main characters are warriors and kings who aren't really ones to sit around discussing mythology and its relation to the night sky unless it has an effect on battle strategy.

In a couple documentaries or science shows, one being Cosmos I think, the ultimate fate of the universe was described as leading to a point where a sentient being might look up at the night sky and see no stars. This has something to do with the increasing rate of expansion of the universe plus the fact that there will be less and less star formation, I think.

And for me, living today, it seems a little lonely, like isolation. Would that future being feel that, having never known of the existence of other stars? I don't know.

I think that humans at least don't always look at the world around them with a logical, scientific eye. Actually, much of the time that is precisely not how they interact with the world. Throughout our history, most people have looked up at the sun, moon, and stars and never or rarely thought about the exact, scientifically-explained reasons for why those things moved as they did or looked as they did.

But they did look up, and they had thoughts. They had feelings about what they saw.

I don't think your warriors have only two options for reaction to the night sky, a) a scientifically literate understanding or b) no reaction at all. They are going to have tales, perhaps songs sung around a campfire the night before battle, or maybe even ways of interpreting the position of the moon and other planet for signs of what may come. Heck, they might have very specific "understandings" of what each phase of the moon portends or the position of the shadows on the moon or on the other planet's face. Even the absence of stars could play a role, for instance if the moon and other planet are very near to each other in the night sky, perhaps this is a type of collusion/cooperation between those bodies, and the total darkness surrounding them lending weight to this impression. If they are far apart, then they may be alone, lost in the darkness, and this could signify something. The point is, you could find a moment for describing that empty blackness that envelopes the two together or separates them.

One reason I mentioned poetry and songs is this: Humans have tales, interpretations, for everything of significance, and these aren't limited to a purely logical, scientific understanding. Heck, maybe these warriors don't normally think in those ways, but maybe when they were children their mothers did and told them bedtime stories or sang lullabies, and these might come back to them sometimes in moments of stress.

Let's imagine two warriors, A and B, and a battle which goes wrong. A is the hardened, experienced warrior and B is barely more than a boy. The other planet is Verta and the moon is Domis. After the battle, A may come up to B and slap him hard on the back of his head, knocking him down: "Boy, you were like Domis wandering lost in the black! Hold formation!" Okay, this doesn't explain everything in one fell swoop, but it's one nugget of information that, along with many other such roundabout, subtle references, could build to a full picture.

If these warriors are not scientists, they'll still have figurative language and ways of understanding these things.

Edit: That said...

I agree with this, but I also don't agree with this. It's fine to fill in small details as the story goes on, yes, but the lack of stars and the gigantic planet floating above the horizon are not small details. If I were reading a book and it wasn't until the twentieth chapter that I learned that the sky was purple the whole time, I'd be kind of annoyed.

The solution to this might be to conscientiously create your early scenes so that you have ample opportunity to deliver a sufficient number of nuggets so your readers are left at least curious about these things and won't be imagining something more Earthlike, as they would in the absence of these nuggets.

The most direct route would be to have some character looking at the night sky and noticing/thinking about things there. This doesn't mean he's looking up only to be looking up—this doesn't have to be a simplistic info dump. The character could be lying on his back under the night sky, lost in thought concerning something that's weighing on his mind, and break out of that thought to notice the sky. An example: The night his father was murdered, that other planet and the moon were at exactly the same position as they are this night.

Incidentally, are there "shooting stars" on this world? I.e., meteors falling? If so, you could describe the flame shooting down through the pure-black sky, somewhere off in one direction away from planet and moon.
 
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Vaporo

Inkling
Incidentally, are there "shooting stars" on this world? I.e., meteors falling? If so, you could describe the flame shooting down through the pure-black sky, somewhere off in one direction away from planet and moon.

Actually, yes, there are. The gods were limited, but thorough. That would actually be a good option. In the first few pages describe a meteor streaking across the ink-black sky.
 
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