Mockay and Givvy

A few days ago, I described the construction of the astrogeophysics of the Tau Ceti system for Part 2 of Rome's Revolution. I used the Earth as my guide when it came to building Decaudo but for the moons I cheated and used Mars as my guide. Mars has two moons: Phobos (fear) and Deimos (dread) and they are much smaller than the Earth's moon.



Phobos is the larger of the two and somewhat elongated. It orbits Mars once every 12 hours. Deimos is more circular but smaller and orbits Mars every 5.5 days. Unlike our moon, these two satellites were most likely asteroids that got caught in the gravitational pull of Mars.

So I decided to give Deucado two similar moons. I have mentioned them in a previous post but I didn't give you much detail. I decided to name my two moons Mockay (Mickey in Vuduri) and Givvy (Goofy in Vuduri). Mockay is much smaller than Givvy but much closer to Deucado. It orbits Deucado once every 12 hours, just like Phobos. I made Givvy a little closer to Deucado than Deimos, it orbits once every 3 days.

In order to portray these moons realistically, I had to figure out what they would look like and when they would appear in the sky. I wrote a program in Visual FoxPro to simulate their orbits. Here is a miniature image of that orbital analysis. You can click on the image to see it full-sized:


That was a lot of work! But it paid off. When I wrote the scenes that occurred at night, I was always able to know exactly when the moons were visible in the sky and when they weren't. Under no circumstance are they very bright and the complete darkness helped Rei discover his sonar-vision in their absence.

Tomorrow, the surprise at the edge of the solar system of Tau Ceti.