By which I mean one moon eclipses another.

Neither is Earth’s Moon of course.

Via Astronomy Picture of  the Day for 26/2/24 this is Mars’s moon Phobos eclipsing its other moon, Deimos, as seen by European Space Agency‘s probe Mars Express.

From You Tube via Astronomy Picture of the Day for 9/5/22.

Phobos crossing the Sun’s disc.

I wouldn’t call this an eclipse – the Sun isn’t fully obscured. I don’t suppose you can call it a transit either (if you define those as involving planets passing in front of the Sun.)

From You Tube via Astronomy Picture of the Day for 20/4/21.

Ingenuity’s first (short) flight through the Martian atmosphere as seen from the Perseverance rover.

This is a (speeded up) sequence showing the partial eclipse of the Sun by a moon of another planet. From You Tube via Astronomy Picture of the Day for 10/4/19.

The moon is Phobos; the planet, Mars. The sun is the Sun.

What could this picture possibly be? Fingerprints? Abstract Art?

It’s actually sand dunes on Mars catching low-angled sunlight.

From Astronomy Picture of the Day for 14/4/2018.

This peer reviewed paper seems to be experimental proof of an electromagnetic space drive capable of getting to Mars in 70 days.

At least according to the Daily Galaxy.

It may not turn out that way though (on the face of it it breaks the laws of Physics which of course “You cannae change, Captain,”)* but it still makes me feel like I’m living in the future.

*From this clip Scotty actually said “can’t” rather than “cannae”:-

I’m a bit late with this as I was away from the computer yesterday but running water on Mars is quite a story.

Astronomy Picture of the Day got to it today as well:-

This video of the larger of Mars’s two moons, Phobos, was Astronomy Picture of the Day for Dec 25^th.

You can’t actually see this rotation from the surface of Mars as Phobos is tide-locked to its primary in the same way Earth’s Moon is to its.

Sidgwick & Jackson, 1979, 252 p.

I picked this up at the same time as The Infinite Cage. It’s of similar vintage.

A Double Shadow is Turner’s only SF novel. He was (is?) mainly a poet.

The book is a strange one, discursive and at times dense, quite often telling rather than showing, to the detriment of characterisation. The main body of the novel is set on a terraformed Mars, with its smaller moon Phobos turned into an auxiliary sun. Here, humanity is divided into Normal humans and the Bloods or Cocks among whom there are three sexes (one hermaphroditic.) The set-up before this is strange, though, being a foreword narrated by a man during the time in which the terraforming is taking place who tells us he is the author of the subsequent novel – into which he occasionally interjects his authorial presence.

The internal novel has characters with names like Chrysanthemum, Narcissus, Hermes and Cleopatra but these do not seem to signify anything. As to the plot, at a theatre performance Narcissus is insulted by some remarks about his performance that he and others hear Michael has made to his wife Snow. The upshot is that a “status war” is declared between the two, where they have to go around gathering support to undermine the other’s position. To this end Michael and Snow climb Olympus Mons (here called Nix Olympica, as it used to be before Mariner 9 showed it was a volcano) while Narcissus and Cleopatra cruise the Martian canals. There is a thesis to be written about the attraction SF writers have for both of these endeavours – especially the canals. That notion seems to have become so embedded into the human collective psyche that it must have expression on every possible occasion.*

In the volcano’s caldera Michael and Snow meet the goddesses who rule Mars in the sense of umpires. One of these, Aphrodite, intervenes in the status war to tragic effect.

The final climactic Cockfight is almost literal – the antagonists strap on wings and spurs and hack at each other – and occurs in the Great Canyon of Coprates, more usually known nowadays as Valles Marineris.

File this one under historical curiosity.

*Mea culpa. My first published story The Face of the Waters centred on the construction of such canals and the possibility of climbing the volcano. When I questioned him (apropos his “Plenty” books) on this general need for there to be canals on Mars Colin Greenland said, “It’s the best bit.”

Whippleshield Books, 2013, 80p.

This is the second in the Apollo Quartet, the first of which, Adrift on the Sea of Rains, has just won the BSFA Award.

Once again we have an Altered History. Here, Alexei Leonov was the first man on the Moon but the Russians quickly gave up going there to concentrate on Space Stations. Our hero, Brigadier General Bradley Elliott, USAF, though, was the first – and only – man on Mars, in 1979. What he found there drives the plot as he is recalled to NASA twenty years later to undertake a faster than light trip to Gliese 376 to investigate what has happened to the colony there.

As in Adrift, there are two strands interleaved with each other (which is not unusual) and tricks with typography but again the Glossary which follows rounds out the tale – even if one part of it appears to contradict a piece of dialogue in the text. That latter could have been a deliberate misdirection, though and a Coda explaining the central conception and the FTL drive is a less successful addition to the formula.

With his utilisation of the glossary Sales seems to have found a new way to tell the space exploration story. It is of course a species of info dumping but he has arguably turned the necessity into a strength.

He is very good on the nuts and bolts of space travel, especially if you can thole the alphabet soup of NASA terminology. A list of abbreviations is given to help with this. Elliott is a complex enough figure though the other characters are less fleshed out; but in an 80 page book only 47 of which are actual story it could hardly be otherwise.