So I finally got around to reading the comics & thoughts on astronomy · 6:18pm May 11th, 2013
I'd been putting it off mainly because it looked like Mare Doloris would get jossed pretty savagely.
But now I have!
And it is pretty jossed. My uninhabited, inhospitable moonscape does not appear to have much in common with the way the ponies' moon is depicted in the comic.
For that matter, does their moon even have phases visible from the planet? I know they have pictures of crescent moons in art and cutie marks, but, as far as I can recall, whenever the moon is seen in the night sky it seems as if the whole disk is illuminated.* I guess this makes sense; if moonrise begins the night as sunrise begins the day, then wouldn't observers on the planet always see the face of the moon pointed directly at the sun? Actually, if it wasn't offset a bit, there'd be a permanent lunar eclipse (I suspect Luna would hate that.) But for this to happen, the planet can't be orbiting the sun with the moon orbiting the planet. The satellite would have to change position relative to the sun for planetary observers or it wouldn't be a moon at all, rather a dwarf planet in an orbit just a tiny bit wider than pony-earth's (but not gravitationally affecting each other) with a year of the exact same length, right?
Gah.
I can certainly see why some authors depict the pony system as a sort of geocentric orrery thingamajig, with a small "satellite sun" orbiting the planet opposite the moon.
Still, I will keep writing MD, and I will not attempt to bring it into continuity with the comics, astronomically or otherwise. Apologies for the >1 month wait between chapters.
*EDIT: Yes, actually, different phases of the moon are visible in the show. That the moon is never visible in the daytime is still crazy and hard to reconcile with even the caramel-hardness sciffy setting of MD, though.
