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A Double Moon Eclipse

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.

An Eclipse on Mars?

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.)

Transit of Phobos

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.

Phobos in the Round

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

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.

A Double Shadow by Frederick Turner

Sidgwick & Jackson, 1979, 252 p.

A Double Shadow cover

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.”

Doomed Moon

I haven’t done one of these for a while.

This is Phobos: one of Mars’s two moons, from Astronomy Picture of the Day, 28/10/12. Phobos definitely resembles a potato in this view. Its orbit is so close to Mars that it will eventually be broken up by tidal forces and the remnants smeared into a ring around the planet.

APOD 28/10/12 Phobos

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