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To touch the light you must pass beneath THE SHADOW: Two moons, geosynchronous orbit, and the nature of the shadow by Asshai


Kurus

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I begin by saying that this post is written in the shadow cast by the work of Lucifer Means Lightbringer (LmL). If you want to understand what is going on here, you should look into at least the first installment of this. I’m sure that most of you  wandering this corner of the internet have already done so, but if not you are in for a real treat.

LmL posits that Planetos initially had two moons, as per Qartheen legend, and that a cometary collision with a currently unknown second moon set into motion the chain of major events still occurring in the World of Ice and Fire. He does so through a huge amount of compelling intratextual analysis, as well as with historical and mythological references. One of his core claims is that Salladhor Saan’s Forging of Lightbringer narrative is in fact a coded memory of cataclysmic events surrounding the Long Night, events so cataclysmic that (as per the story) they “left a crack across the face of the moon.” Earlier versions of LmL’s theory included one of the moons being totally destroyed. Recently in his podcasts I have heard him back off from that a bit, supposing perhaps ice and fire characteristics of one moon, or perhaps other alternatives. I want to grab onto that a bit, and pose my theory for what “the shadow” by Asshai might be.

Geosynchronous Orbit

Geosynchronous orbit is an orbital pattern in which a satellite moves in time with the rotation the body it is orbiting. This is to say that it always stays over the same bit of the Earth’s surface, and can always be found in the same place in the sky. It’s a useful concept for communications satellites that must stay over a given area to be effective. Imagine if a satellite that needed direct line of sight slowly drifted in its orbit, off away from its original area and behind the planet. That satellite would become useless, as Earth itself would be preventing that direct line of sight. Now, satellites need not use this system: a constellation of satellites can be charged with taking care of different areas of the Earth’s surface at different times. However, many networks still use geosynchronous orbit, particularly if they only need to service a given region.

So is George thinking about satellites? I would think so. People keep getting weird dreams bounced to them while sleeping or standing in moonlight (Sweet Robin, Catelyn, Jaime, probably Dany), and Quaithe communicates through moonlight/starlight. Jon takes notice of the moon staring down at him while warging Ghost. When Bran is training in the cave, GRRM goes out of his way to state that neither sunlight nor moonlight reaches him.

There’s a lot of debate about whether ASoIaF is in fact hidden sci-fi. This is a topic I could write about at some length… later. For now I would summarize by saying that I believe GRRM writes sci-fi that is so soft that it might as well be fantasy. Even in his sci-fi stories we have psychic powers, time travel, consciousness projection. GRRM himself even decries a strict delineation between sci-fi and fantasy via his “furniture rule,” saying that the only real difference between the two genres is aesthetic. I disagree, strongly, but I will come back to that. Suffice it to say that he has included scientifically informed analysis into his fantasy. This may help us get over some hurtles in the nitty gritty science of what I am proposing.

Moonshadow

One of the Bravosi courtesans we hear about is called “The Moonshadow.” Pretty much all we hear about her is that she hangs around the moon pool, hears Daemon singing and goes down to kiss him. Big whoop!

What could it all mean, though? Applying the rule of GRRM surplussage, I am going to go ahead and ascribe one possible meaning to the interaction symbolized by “the Moonshadow.” Here goes:

There is a second moon still hanging in the skies of Planetos, but is locked in geosynchronous orbit over the area now called the shadowlands.

This helps resolve why the Asshai is referred to as “by the shadow” instead of “by the shadow lands.” It would help us understand why “the shadow” is always referred to as a singular entity, and why Quaithe goes so far as to say that Dany must pass “beneath the shadow.” “The shadow” is “the moonshadow.”

Mechanics and problem

The biggest problem with this theory has to do with orbital mechanics. Specifically, Earth’s geosynchronous orbit is waaaaaaay, way up there. Geostationary orbit (i.e. the totally circular variant of geosynchronous orbit) is about 36,000 km up from the earth’s surface, a distance more than twice the diameter of the Earth itself (p.s. next time they talk about an asteroid passing “beneath the communication satellites” you now know that that’s not actually super close). Anything moving with only enough angular velocity to stay over the same bit of land that is LOWER than that will gradually fall to Earth’s surface, or quickly fall depending on how low it is. This is because orbit is essentially falling towards the Earth, but continually missing (hey Douglass Adams). Lower than 36,000 km, you need to be moving pretty fast to keep missing. You need to outrun the day/night cycle.

I bring this up because I’m thinking about a small moon close to the surface of Planetos. You see, a small moon far away would be nearly invisible from the surface, and would not cast any area in darkness reliably enough for it to be called “the shadow.” A large moon might do better, but would also cast its eclipse across broad areas unreliably, and would also be clearly visible across half the world.

A small moon close in would definitely do the trick though, even though such a moon maintaining its orbit would be impossible. Perhaps this is where moonsingers and psychic hand-wavyness comes in: pushing the moon up, or communicating with some facility or presence there that does the same.

There are a few scientific explanations that might help. They don’t really solve the issue, but might work at the margins. 1) Planetos might be smaller than Earth, making the geosynchronous position lower: it would have to be a lot smaller for this to matter, and GRRM has idly speculated that it is indeed bigger than Earth. 2) Planetosy days might be longer than Earth days: we don’t really have any indication of this, but maybe. We also don’t know if everyone there isn’t actually 4 inches tall, and we just assumed they were our size, or if they’re really all crabs and we assumed they were humans while we were reading. Betcha didn’t know that everyone in LoTR had long hair when you read that, but then Peter Jackson showed us. Seriously, name one character with short hair in that.

Anyway, I’m sticking with psychic powers for now. If you think that sounds crazy, just do as Preston Jacobs suggests and read Nightflyers.

Land of Shadow

So, assuming that we are allowing this moon to hang in the sky in GRRM-verse, then what would the area of the moonshadow be like? Well, to get a sense of how visually arresting it would be, give this a gander.

There are a bunch of ways that what I’m suggesting deviates from that video. I’m talking about a smaller and closer moon: maybe a hundred kilometers across, and hanging a hundred meters from the surface. The visual impact of that would be similar to that of the moon in the video, but over a much smaller area. Also, I’m talking about a moon that just hangs there in the sky, unmoving. You would still get periods of light and dark over the course of the day, but due to the cycle of the sun through the sky: spending a good deal of time eclipsed by the apparently large and unmoving moon.

This idea actually works out well in a bunch of different ways.

First: it explains how a second moon could be hanging over one area, while remaining largely unseen from others. This thing here says that the distance to the horizon on Earth for an object 200 kilometers tall would be around 1600 kilometers. This covers a large area, but nowhere near a half of the Earth’s surface. Outside of that area, no one would be able to see the upper edge of the low-hanging moon: it would be obscured behind the horizon. This could be why GRRM is being so cagey about POV’s close to Asshai.

Second: This even ties into the Bloodstone Emperor’s Lucifer/Venus/Morningstar/Evenstar motif. This is because the moon would only be noticeable at the outer edges of the viewing radius around morning and evening.  At midday the sun would be largely behind it, rendering it invisible. However, some mornings/evenings, the low sun cutting straight across the horizon would be able to catch a crescent of it. This might even be what Barristan Selmy is seeing in the kingmaker chapter, when he discusses a red slash on the horizon. Because it would hang so low on the horizon, the only times this small moon would eclipse areas on the borders of its visible range would be when night was about to fall or lift, making its eclipses seem like nothing more than a brief continuation of night. In a way, it’s not just a Morning/evenstar, it’s sometimes a morning/even-void.

Third: it would explain a normally shadowed or black moon. This moon would be so close to Planetos that it would never shine at night, due to being in a prolonged state of lunar eclipse, i.e., Planetos itself would block the light from reaching it. So this would be a heavenly body that would spend the vast majority of its time: throughout most of the day and most of the night; invisible or as a dark void in the sky.

In the immediate vicinity of “the shadow” the effects would be huge. Much of the day would be spent in solar eclipse, and as the sun approached the margins of the second moon, one would be able to see the fiery corona leaking out around it. You might always see the corona, in fact, as it can extend far from a star’s surface.

This would give the visual impression of a shadowed core embraced by arms of fire. If it were described as a spiritual entity, it might well be described as a lord of flame and shadow. It might look like this, or even a bit like this. Such a relationship might explain the paradoxical relationship between flame and shadow in R’hllorist faith. It might also explain what the BSE was trying to do, all those millennia ago. He may have been trying to permanently park the fire moon over his kingdom, perhaps sensing a need to replace some source of astrological power whose waning was leading to the deaths of kings and the weakening of the GEotDawn. I think this may help explain the corrupted nature of the heart of fire in this world: pure sunfire being replaced by a version filtered through a greasy heliotrope moon.

Returning to Bravos and the moonpool, we could be nearing a global disaster on a scale dwarfing a new commetary impact. If the moonsingers or some similar force (Daemon) are infact pulling the moon down rather than keeping it up, then we could see that moon kissing Planetos’ surface. This would cause an impact so enormous as to possibly reliquify Planetos’ surface.

 

P.S., this may have belonged more on the World of Ice and Fire thread, but that doesn’t get a lot of action these days. If you want to check out some more crude, latter-day building I did on top of the fused black stone foundations of LmL and a bunch of other people, check this out.

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Not sure the geometry works here. If the moon casts a shadow anywhere, it creates a moving swath of shadow across the entire hemisphere. Unless it is somehow orbiting against the rotation of the planet, there's no way for the eclipse shadow to be stationary. 

 

As for eternal eclipse, I don't think that's physically possible. Orbit work because the body is always moving sideways relative to gravitation. If it stopped orbiting, it would fall straight into the planet. The only way a body could be fixed between earth and Sun is if it's got it's own orbit around the sun, and then it would have to be a gigantic planet to both maintain its own solar orbit and throughly block out the sun from such a distance.

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That was why I discussed the horizon issues. A small moon orbiting very very low would not cast its shadow across a whole hemisphere, because the horizon would block it over most of the hemisphere's surface. The real moon isn't visible over a whole hemisphere either, btw, just substantially all of it.

By the way, if you want to look at a moon that is about the size of what I'm talking about, check out Enceladus, an ice moon of all things.

And if you want to see a tiny "moon" that orbits a lot closer to its parent then ours does, check out Phobos.

The eclipse discussed is not eternal. I shouldn't have used the term "permanent" in there, and you are right to point that out. However, we are talking about an area that would spend a good amount of the day, EVERY DAY (because it's close to the equator) under the umbra of an eclipse, and potentially seeing the corona of the "sun" perpetually during this time, for your dark heart of fire imagery. The only time this area would get sunlight, ironically, would be evening and morning.

The shadow cast across the broader area of far eastern Essos would not be readily apparent as an eclipse. It would likely occur rarely, because of the smallness of the moon, and would only ever occur when night was about to fall or end, anyway, because it hung so low on the horizon. This would make it difficult to separate this eclipse effect from an extension of the night. During the day, it might be difficult to see the moon at all due to the bright sunlight. Our moon is a very bright, almost white-grey, and we can still barely see it in the day. A low albedo, greasy obsidian dark moon might be totally invisible. You might only see it just before dawn, it's upper edge looking like a red slash on the horizon.

As to Chrisdaw's theory, it's not actually inconsistent with mine. The main, larger moon being pushed to permanently eclipse the sun would only be a version of what happened in Asshai writ large.

 

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32 minutes ago, cgrav said:

Not sure the geometry works here. If the moon casts a shadow anywhere, it creates a moving swath of shadow across the entire hemisphere. Unless it is somehow orbiting against the rotation of the planet, there's no way for the eclipse shadow to be stationary.

As for eternal eclipse, I don't think that's physically possible. Orbit work because the body is always moving sideways relative to gravitation. If it stopped orbiting, it would fall straight into the planet. The only way a body could be fixed between earth and Sun is if it's got it's own orbit around the sun, and then it would have to be a gigantic planet to both maintain its own solar orbit and throughly block out the sun from such a distance.

No, that wouldn't work, either. Every orbit has its own unique velocity. The lower you hang over the Earth's surface, the faster must you run, lest you fall.

But, there is a place where you could remain stationary relative to both Earth and Sun, actually a few such places, named Lagrangian points. One of them is indeed between the Sun and the Earth, it's conventionally named L1 and it's about 1.5 million kilometers from where I sit (much farther than the Moon). If you lose your keys there, they'll stay there.

Of course, the object placed there wouldn't cast shadow over one particular area: the Sun - Sumthin' - Earth arrangement would remain constant, but the Earth still rotates underneath.

12 minutes ago, Kurus said:

That was why I discussed the horizon issues. A small moon orbiting very very low would not cast its shadow across a whole hemisphere, because the horizon would block it over most of the hemisphere's surface. The real moon isn't visible over a whole hemisphere either, btw, just substantially all of it.

By the way, if you want to look at a moon that is about the size of what I'm talking about, check out Enceladus, an ice moon of all things.

And if you want to see a tiny "moon" that orbits a lot closer to its parent then ours does, check out Phobos.

The eclipse discussed is not eternal. I shouldn't have used the term "permanent" in there, and you are right to point that out. However, we are talking about an area that would spend a good amount of the day, EVERY DAY (because it's close to the equator) under the umbra of an eclipse, and potentially seeing the corona of the "sun" perpetually during this time, for your dark heart of fire imagery. The only time this area would get sunlight, ironically, would be evening and morning.

But wouldn't that area be basically the entire equator? That wouldn't be a phenomenon unique to some specific place, but to latitude. People wouldn't think "if you go to Asshai specifically, that weird shit happens", but "if you go too far south, that weird shit happens".

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Just now, Ferocious Veldt Roarer said:

 

But wouldn't that area be basically the entire equator? That wouldn't be a phenomenon unique to some specific place, but to latitude. People wouldn't think "if you go to Asshai specifically, that weird shit happens", but "if you go too far south, that weird shit happens".

Yeah, this is what I meant by "swath". Even if this proposed moon were in geosynchronous orbit, the shadow would move across the hemisphere throughout the day, from west to east. 

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No, sorry Ferocious Veldt Roarer, that's not accurate. Well, the "lest you fall" part is, but I discussed that above. The Lagrangian points are significant in that they allow an orbit to be maintained with no additional energy. They allow you to hang in a certain position with respect to the center of the body you are orbiting, not with respect to its surface and rotation. This means that a body would still appear to move around the sky and beneath the horizon in much the same way that the fixed stars of the firmament do, and would not have the desired effect. The L-points are also far away.

No, a 100km moon (somehow) hanging 100 km over the surface would cast a shadow like a 200-km tall tower: the areas most effected by it would be in the immediate vicinity.

Yes, the shadow does move across the roughly 3000km area (again, not the whole hemisphere) but visually, if you are at the margins of the effected area it's difficult to separate this eclipse effect from nighttime itself, because it only happens close to night (imagine the long shadows cast by that 200km tall tower.)

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I think it's a really cool idea despite the fact that it is not totally consistent with gravitational physics.  But this is a magical world with ice zombies, dragons and resurrected people etc.

To borrow a quote from The Simpsons:  Whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it.

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11 minutes ago, Kurus said:

No, sorry Ferocious Veldt Roarer, that's not accurate. Well, the "lest you fall" part is, but I discussed that above. The Lagrangian points are significant in that they allow an orbit to be maintained with no additional energy. They allow you to hang in a certain position with respect to the center of the body you are orbiting, not with respect to its surface and rotation. This means that a body would still appear to move around the sky and beneath the horizon in much the same way that the fixed stars of the firmament do, and would not have the desired effect.

That's what I said:
Of course, the object placed there wouldn't cast shadow over one particular area: the Sun - Sumthin' - Earth arrangement would remain constant, but the Earth still rotates underneath.

11 minutes ago, Kurus said:

The L-points are also far away.

That's what I said, too:

it's conventionally named L1 and it's about 1.5 million kilometers from where I sit (much farther than the Moon)

 

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I'd also like to add that such an object hanging a mere 100km above Planetos is well within the Roche limit, the minimal distance at which objects bound together by gravitational forces can maintain themselves.  For Earth, any moon closer than about 6,000km would be ripped apart by tidal forces, and if Planetos is larger than Earth then that distance is greater.

But still, a cool idea and a wizard did it etc.

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It's wrong in the sense that you used the term "hemisphere" when we are in fact talking about a much smaller area, and in that you used that term to imply that the shadowing effect would be too spread/evenly spread to have a special impact on a given region, when in fact that is exactly what we would see. The shadow would linger most prominently immediately below the second moon, and impacts on the margins of the area would be both sporadic and almost unnoticeable.

Though I am not a scientist, I believe that my description of the effects of a body in geosynchronous orbit as I have described is fairly accurate. That being said the detractors are correct insofar as there is a huge scientific problem with a body MAINTAINING such an orbit without falling quickly onto the surface. I believe Schmewdog is fundamentally correct in that George writes more science-themed fantasy than science fiction. I would go so far as to say this is true EVEN WHEN HE IS WRITING SCI FI. Take as an example the Volcryn from Nightflyers: an enormous biological entity that propels itself close to the speed of light using unscientific psychic powers. If that can be in that, then a moonlet following some shady orbital mechanics can be in ASoIaF.

I like the Shadow Theory not just because it's fun, but because it helps explain why the shadow is always termed as an entity, and why Quaithe wants Dany to pass "beneath" it.

In a way, this could shed light on what the actual magical conflict at the heart of the Blood Betrayal was. I once read somewhere (I need to find it again) that the "Starfall" of House Dayne was not actually a meteorite, but was the gradual dipping of important constellations beneath the horizon. The Daynes in this scenario would represent a refugee branch of one of the GEotDawn royal families seeking to reestablish contact with those stars. Starlight is strongly correlated with immortality (in the Dayne theorization post that I need to find again {Also, the immortal God on Earth is the child of the stars}), and it could be that reason for the weakening of the Empire had to do with being cut off from that starlight.

The BSE could have been desperately seeking an alternative source of power, and settled on the "dark heart of fire" idea. I believe that Jon Snow's wall-defense, fire sword dream is connected to the BSE. It is possible that after his own passing-over in the line of succession, he was supposed to be placated by being given the "Lord Commander" position of the Five Forts. Seeing the desperate military situation and the non-responsiveness of the aloof capital intelligentsia, he decided he needed to take matters into his own hands to save the country.

In this scenario, psychic manipulation of the Red Comet is used not to destroy a moon, but to nudge it into a position of permanent eclipse over GEotDawn heartlands: Stygai. 'Stygian' is a word with connections to the river Styx, and means "very dark." The WoIaF says it only gets light at midday, admittedly the opposite of the phenomenon I'm describing, though perhaps not it there is some kind of hole punctured right through the moon by the comet.

BTW, I was just on the wiki, and it said this about Martin's inspiration: "The name "Stygai" may be a nod to "Stygia" from the story “Shadows in the Moonlight” by Robert E. Howard. In an essay in his Dreamsongs anthology Martin cites reading Howard's story as a formative experience in his (Martin's) development as a reader of fantasy. Martin quotes to a passage referring to Stygia 'with its shadow-guarded tombs.'"

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It's like a long haired fringe, plus Grishnakh definitely has orc-pattern baldness.

The more I think about the Shadow idea, the more it kind of comes together:

A hole right through the moon, blasting out its heart would represent the plunging of lightbringer into Nissa Nissa's heart.

The opposition between the BSE and his followers and Garth the Green, manifest by the Stannis/Renly standoff, would fundamentally be about agriculture, food, and the way that the BSE's plan would destroy the photosynthetic potential of the Empire. Remember, Asshai imports all its food, and the shadowlands don't grow normal plants: only the inedible ghost grass. Garth and his followers, "the first men," would be refugees from the photosynthetic disaster of the moonshadow.

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19 hours ago, Kurus said:

I begin by saying that this post is written in the shadow cast by the work of Lucifer Means Lightbringer (LmL). If you want to understand what is going on here, you should look into at least the first installment of this. I’m sure that most of you  wandering this corner of the internet have already done so, but if not you are in for a real treat.

 

LmL posits that Planetos initially had two moons, as per Qartheen legend, and that a cometary collision with a currently unknown second moon set into motion the chain of major events still occurring in the World of Ice and Fire. He does so through a huge amount of compelling intratextual analysis, as well as with historical and mythological references. One of his core claims is that Salladhor Saan’s Forging of Lightbringer narrative is in fact a coded memory of cataclysmic events surrounding the Long Night, events so cataclysmic that (as per the story) they “left a crack across the face of the moon.” Earlier versions of LmL’s theory included one of the moons being totally destroyed. Recently in his podcasts I have heard him back off from that a bit, supposing perhaps ice and fire characteristics of one moon, or perhaps other alternatives. I want to grab onto that a bit, and pose my theory for what “the shadow” by Asshai might be.

 

Geosynchronous Orbit

 

Geosynchronous orbit is an orbital pattern in which a satellite moves in time with the rotation the body it is orbiting. This is to say that it always stays over the same bit of the Earth’s surface, and can always be found in the same place in the sky. It’s a useful concept for communications satellites that must stay over a given area to be effective. Imagine if a satellite that needed direct line of sight slowly drifted in its orbit, off away from its original area and behind the planet. That satellite would become useless, as Earth itself would be preventing that direct line of sight. Now, satellites need not use this system: a constellation of satellites can be charged with taking care of different areas of the Earth’s surface at different times. However, many networks still use geosynchronous orbit, particularly if they only need to service a given region.

 

So is George thinking about satellites? I would think so. People keep getting weird dreams bounced to them while sleeping or standing in moonlight (Sweet Robin, Catelyn, Jaime, probably Dany), and Quaithe communicates through moonlight/starlight. Jon takes notice of the moon staring down at him while warging Ghost. When Bran is training in the cave, GRRM goes out of his way to state that neither sunlight nor moonlight reaches him.

 

There’s a lot of debate about whether ASoIaF is in fact hidden sci-fi. This is a topic I could write about at some length… later. For now I would summarize by saying that I believe GRRM writes sci-fi that is so soft that it might as well be fantasy. Even in his sci-fi stories we have psychic powers, time travel, consciousness projection. GRRM himself even decries a strict delineation between sci-fi and fantasy via his “furniture rule,” saying that the only real difference between the two genres is aesthetic. I disagree, strongly, but I will come back to that. Suffice it to say that he has included scientifically informed analysis into his fantasy. This may help us get over some hurtles in the nitty gritty science of what I am proposing.

 

Moonshadow

 

One of the Bravosi courtesans we hear about is called “The Moonshadow.” Pretty much all we hear about her is that she hangs around the moon pool, hears Daemon singing and goes down to kiss him. Big whoop!

 

What could it all mean, though? Applying the rule of GRRM surplussage, I am going to go ahead and ascribe one possible meaning to the interaction symbolized by “the Moonshadow.” Here goes:

 

There is a second moon still hanging in the skies of Planetos, but is locked in geosynchronous orbit over the area now called the shadowlands.

 

This helps resolve why the Asshai is referred to as “by the shadow” instead of “by the shadow lands.” It would help us understand why “the shadow” is always referred to as a singular entity, and why Quaithe goes so far as to say that Dany must pass “beneath the shadow.” “The shadow” is “the moonshadow.”

 

Mechanics and problem

 

The biggest problem with this theory has to do with orbital mechanics. Specifically, Earth’s geosynchronous orbit is waaaaaaay, way up there. Geostationary orbit (i.e. the totally circular variant of geosynchronous orbit) is about 36,000 km up from the earth’s surface, a distance more than twice the diameter of the Earth itself (p.s. next time they talk about an asteroid passing “beneath the communication satellites” you now know that that’s not actually super close). Anything moving with only enough angular velocity to stay over the same bit of land that is LOWER than that will gradually fall to Earth’s surface, or quickly fall depending on how low it is. This is because orbit is essentially falling towards the Earth, but continually missing (hey Douglass Adams). Lower than 36,000 km, you need to be moving pretty fast to keep missing. You need to outrun the day/night cycle.

 

I bring this up because I’m thinking about a small moon close to the surface of Planetos. You see, a small moon far away would be nearly invisible from the surface, and would not cast any area in darkness reliably enough for it to be called “the shadow.” A large moon might do better, but would also cast its eclipse across broad areas unreliably, and would also be clearly visible across half the world.

 

A small moon close in would definitely do the trick though, even though such a moon maintaining its orbit would be impossible. Perhaps this is where moonsingers and psychic hand-wavyness comes in: pushing the moon up, or communicating with some facility or presence there that does the same.

 

There are a few scientific explanations that might help. They don’t really solve the issue, but might work at the margins. 1) Planetos might be smaller than Earth, making the geosynchronous position lower: it would have to be a lot smaller for this to matter, and GRRM has idly speculated that it is indeed bigger than Earth. 2) Planetosy days might be longer than Earth days: we don’t really have any indication of this, but maybe. We also don’t know if everyone there isn’t actually 4 inches tall, and we just assumed they were our size, or if they’re really all crabs and we assumed they were humans while we were reading. Betcha didn’t know that everyone in LoTR had long hair when you read that, but then Peter Jackson showed us. Seriously, name one character with short hair in that.

 

Anyway, I’m sticking with psychic powers for now. If you think that sounds crazy, just do as Preston Jacobs suggests and read Nightflyers.

 

Land of Shadow

 

So, assuming that we are allowing this moon to hang in the sky in GRRM-verse, then what would the area of the moonshadow be like? Well, to get a sense of how visually arresting it would be, give this a gander.

 

There are a bunch of ways that what I’m suggesting deviates from that video. I’m talking about a smaller and closer moon: maybe a hundred kilometers across, and hanging a hundred meters from the surface. The visual impact of that would be similar to that of the moon in the video, but over a much smaller area. Also, I’m talking about a moon that just hangs there in the sky, unmoving. You would still get periods of light and dark over the course of the day, but due to the cycle of the sun through the sky: spending a good deal of time eclipsed by the apparently large and unmoving moon.

 

This idea actually works out well in a bunch of different ways.

 

First: it explains how a second moon could be hanging over one area, while remaining largely unseen from others. This thing here says that the distance to the horizon on Earth for an object 200 kilometers tall would be around 1600 kilometers. This covers a large area, but nowhere near a half of the Earth’s surface. Outside of that area, no one would be able to see the upper edge of the low-hanging moon: it would be obscured behind the horizon. This could be why GRRM is being so cagey about POV’s close to Asshai.

 

Second: This even ties into the Bloodstone Emperor’s Lucifer/Venus/Morningstar/Evenstar motif. This is because the moon would only be noticeable at the outer edges of the viewing radius around morning and evening.  At midday the sun would be largely behind it, rendering it invisible. However, some mornings/evenings, the low sun cutting straight across the horizon would be able to catch a crescent of it. This might even be what Barristan Selmy is seeing in the kingmaker chapter, when he discusses a red slash on the horizon. Because it would hang so low on the horizon, the only times this small moon would eclipse areas on the borders of its visible range would be when night was about to fall or lift, making its eclipses seem like nothing more than a brief continuation of night. In a way, it’s not just a Morning/evenstar, it’s sometimes a morning/even-void.

 

Third: it would explain a normally shadowed or black moon. This moon would be so close to Planetos that it would never shine at night, due to being in a prolonged state of lunar eclipse, i.e., Planetos itself would block the light from reaching it. So this would be a heavenly body that would spend the vast majority of its time: throughout most of the day and most of the night; invisible or as a dark void in the sky.

 

In the immediate vicinity of “the shadow” the effects would be huge. Much of the day would be spent in solar eclipse, and as the sun approached the margins of the second moon, one would be able to see the fiery corona leaking out around it. You might always see the corona, in fact, as it can extend far from a star’s surface.

 

This would give the visual impression of a shadowed core embraced by arms of fire. If it were described as a spiritual entity, it might well be described as a lord of flame and shadow. It might look like this, or even a bit like this. Such a relationship might explain the paradoxical relationship between flame and shadow in R’hllorist faith. It might also explain what the BSE was trying to do, all those millennia ago. He may have been trying to permanently park the fire moon over his kingdom, perhaps sensing a need to replace some source of astrological power whose waning was leading to the deaths of kings and the weakening of the GEotDawn. I think this may help explain the corrupted nature of the heart of fire in this world: pure sunfire being replaced by a version filtered through a greasy heliotrope moon.

 

Returning to Bravos and the moonpool, we could be nearing a global disaster on a scale dwarfing a new commetary impact. If the moonsingers or some similar force (Daemon) are infact pulling the moon down rather than keeping it up, then we could see that moon kissing Planetos’ surface. This would cause an impact so enormous as to possibly reliquify Planetos’ surface.

 

 

 

P.S., this may have belonged more on the World of Ice and Fire thread, but that doesn’t get a lot of action these days. If you want to check out some more crude, latter-day building I did on top of the fused black stone foundations of LmL and a bunch of other people, check this out.

 

The issue with "shadowlands" is that even if a moon was in geosynchronous orbit, it would not block the sun all the time. It would only do so at mid day.

In order for the corona to be visible you would require the apparent diameter of the moon to be the same as the sun (or you would not see it), and for that to happen the eclipse would only last a few minutes each day.

So, sorry, your speculation does not hold up.

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The corona projects well outside the diameter of our own sun, and also it would depend on the stellar characteristics of the star in question. Also, the corona might indeed not be visible all the time, but might be visible sometimes.

As to the duration of time the sun would be blocked out, it could be blocked out far longer if the apparent size of the moon was much larger, as it would be if it were very close to the surface.

I believe the biggest hole in my theory is found in neither of the two comments you bring up, but in that Stygai only seems to get sunlight AT midday. That is why I posited my "hole through the moon" idea, but that is admittedly grasping at straws. I still like the idea of a moon hanging overhead, though, in the context of the "Shadows in the Moonlight"/Stygia connection.

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As to the meaning of MMD's words in the thread title, it's referring to Dany's death and second life as a dragon. Shadow as death and light as life. As with a lot of Dany stuff it's very biblical, Maegi for Magi, following stars, myhsa probably came from Missa/Missal.

I think it likely GRRM has read a poem The Passion about Jesus' death, and his line may have specifically been influenced by 'I pass beneath the shadow of thy woe', given other glaring similarities.

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On October 18, 2016 at 11:46 AM, cgrav said:

Not sure the geometry works here. If the moon casts a shadow anywhere, it creates a moving swath of shadow across the entire hemisphere. Unless it is somehow orbiting against the rotation of the planet, there's no way for the eclipse shadow to be stationary. 

 

As for eternal eclipse, I don't think that's physically possible. Orbit work because the body is always moving sideways relative to gravitation. If it stopped orbiting, it would fall straight into the planet. The only way a body could be fixed between earth and Sun is if it's got it's own orbit around the sun, and then it would have to be a gigantic planet to both maintain its own solar orbit and throughly block out the sun from such a distance.

Correct - the ongoing eclipse idea is nonsensical in the extreme. It came up early on and I think it can be safely discarded. It's by far the most impossible of any proposed celestial mechanics.  Obviously any scenario we are discussing here would involve magic, so some level of implausibility is acceptable. I prefer explanations which are not completely nonsensical however. Meteor impacts can throw up clouds of ash and debris which can indeed blot out the sun, so that basic mechanism makes rational sense, but we have to add magic to get the Others and to get a comet to actully explode a moon, which is mostly implausible unless the moon were very small (possible) and the comet very large (which it does seem to be). But a moon which just stops in place between the moon and the sun - it just makes no sense to me. 

 

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