Re: equinox

Pablo Flores wrote:
> I once began to think, just as an exercise, about how the seasons would go
> on in a planet with two or more suns.
A great story to read relating to this is Asimov's _Nightfall_ (?),
there's also a book by Asimov based on that short story.  It's about a
planet with *six* suns, arranged in such a way that there is never
night, altho there are times when only the dimmest of the six is in the
sky.  The people do not have any idea of stars, and are pathologically
afraid of the dark.  Just being in a darkened room is enough to drive
some insane!  Anyways, there is a dark planet orbiting their planet,
which was discovered on the basis of gravitational anomolies in their
planet's orbit.  Every 2,000 years or so, during the period when only
one sun is in the sky, that sun is eclipsed by the dark planet.  For a
few brief hours, their planet is plunged into night, and they are
exposed to the STARS, unfortunately for them, their in the middle of a
massive star-cluster.  This is too much for them, and it destroys their
minds, many are left insane.  So, every 2000 years, their civilization
is destroyed, and a new one begins.  A few who had hidden inside, warned
either by cryptic legends from the previous Nightfall, or by the
discovery, via gravitational studies, of the Dark Planet and prediction
of the Nightfall, tried to rebuild civilization.  It's a great
story/book (the book goes into more detail about the aftermath of
Nightfall).  Imagine a language with no word for star!

On the opposite extreme, the planet Krikkit from Hitchhiker's Guid to
the Galaxy, no stars, no moons, no planets, only one sun - they were in
the middle of a dark nebula, and were unaware that there was even such a
thing as the sky!  It was like one giant blind spot, since there's
nothing to see in the sky, they don't pay attention to it.

--
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social value under the public's 'right to know.'" - Kenneth Star, 1987
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