It's nothing halfway to a secret that I really like foxes, so it's a given that I would want my main protagonist to represent them (especially when everybody turns into a cool animal themed magical girl...). Alas, Moonset's fantasy aspects only reach so deep, resulting in Tsukiko's regretable lack of ears and a tail. Instead, to make her a fox girl, I had to use more abstract visual cues. Hence her yellow eyes, drawn with a purposefully narrow pupil, and the black lipstick and eyeshadow which are reminiesent of a fox's snout and smokey eyes. Above all else, though, is the most important part of her design: her hair. Dyed bright orange, tips stark white, like the colour of a fox's tail. Because of this striking visual, Tsukiko's hair became a very important part of her character. It's drawn as being styled in a particular way: very voluminous and shaped with strongly defined texture and layers. It's the centre of Tsukiko's scene look. Moonset is a work aesthetically rooted in the 2000s, and Tsukiko carries the spirit of the emo and scene culture of classic MySpace with her.

The presense of her scarf is for the sake of being visually dynamic. It adds a sense of weight and direction to any given illustration of her. The obvious connection is to the Kamen Rider franchise, where the original titular character wore a scarf as part of his suit; as a tribute, this design element is also present in Kamen Rider W (my favourite series), Kamen Rider Gotchard (my favourite main protagonist suit design), and Hideaki Anno's amazing Shin Kamen Rider. I think subconciously the striped scarf look actually came from Knives from Scott Pilgrim, though.

There were seven of those wanderers. Two of them were very important, and a lot bigger than the others. One rose in the sky and shone so brightly that it provided daylight, and shut the others out from view until it went back down. Alongside it was one that was also pretty big, and would sometimes give a bit of light. Those two got used to track time, as the movement of the really big one made the singular "day" where you could move and work while it was light out and rest when it was dark. When we got to forming civilizations and started needing to track more complicated things, people came up with a system based on tracking how much light the dimmer one had at night, which came and went in a consistent pattern; this is what one would call a "month".

Once humans started working on complex language, we started naming these things (not to mention often revering them as gods). The still ones are what are commonly identified as "stars", and the moving ones are called "planets." In my language, the planets are known today as "the Sun", "the Moon", "Mercury", "Venus", "Mars", "Saturn", and "Jupiter".

Except, that's not really right.

Firstly the Greeks (the most major pioneers in this stuff) thought for a long time that Mercury and Venus were different things when visible in daylight, but they got over that relatively quickly. The first real breakthrough wasn't until all the way in the common calendar year 1543, where we figured out that the Sun is actually a star too, just way closer to us than all the other ones. Earth was in fact itself a planet, and it moved in an orbit around the Sun just like the others did, making up the Solar System. Except the Moon, who actually orbited Earth! A few decades after that we discovered that Jupiter and Saturn had moons too.

In 1781 we discovered there were more planets. We found "Uranus", a huge ball of ice so far out that we couldn't see it in the night sky.

We also found what we thought were smaller planets located closer to the ones we knew. Within a couple years we discovered the planets named "Ceres", "Pallas", "Juno", and "Vesta". About forty years after those were "Astraea", "Hebe", and "Iris". It didn't take long to find so many tiny "planets" in the inner Solar System that we had to distinguish them from the major planets, leading to the coining of the term "Asteroid". (In the present day, we know there are upwards of one million total asteroids within the Solar System, even if only a tiny fraction of those are notable in any way).

1846, we discover a planet quite like Uranus: Neptune.

1930, a tiny body - more akin to those closest to the Sun - is discovered past the orbit of Neptune. It is eventually named Pluto, the ninth planet.

This lineup of nine planets cements itself in pop culture. Children worldwide are taught this lineup, and media feature space themed characters based on these nine. Everything changes in 2006, with the discovery of a very Pluto-like object known as Eris. To much controversy, the International Astronomical Union - the body who standardises space studies - establish a new, concrete definition of a Solar System planet: an object which orbits the sun, is rounded by the weighted of its own gravity, and "clears the neighborhood", meaning they are without contest the most gravitionally dominant thing within their path of orbit. Pluto fails to meet this third condition, leading it to be reclassified as a "dwarf planet.", alongside Eris.

This decision is met with extreme outcry, and to this day it is a common sentiment that "Pluto should still be a planet", but there's little basis for this other than stubborn nostalgia. Today there are three more IAU recognised dwarf planets (one of which is Ceres the asteroid from earlier!) and four more on top of that which are widely expected to get added some day. However, it is perhaps a valid point to ask if the IAU definition if arbitrary. In my opinion it is, but that's not to criticize it or call it wrong. It's a simple fact of life that things are arbitrary; that doesn't mean they're worthless.

(As an aside, my big issue with the IAU model is just that I think "dwarf planet" is a lame name. If they gave the Pluto-likes a unique, cool identifier for their category I think it would've gone over a lot better).

There is, in fact, one other definition of "planet" that sees widespread legitmate scientific use: the geophysical definition. The geological sciences are concerned with studying planets when it comes to their own composition and physical history, which means that the normal definition of planet isn't very helpful in categorizing anything to them. The many dwarf planets and moons of the Solar System are geologically more similar to the Earth, so from the point-of-view a geologist who's not looking at orbits, calling them a different type of thing might seem silly. The problem there is that there are soooo many rocky things in the Solar System, it's far more absurd to try to put them all in a list as "stuff like Earth". Unlike the IAU, the ruling body on geology matters, the IUGS, hasn't ever officially put forth a geophysical definition of "planet", but there's still a consensus definition that astrogeologists tend to use: a planet is a Solar System object which has hydrostatic equilibrium.

There's a lot of physics that I would have to detail to explain what exactly that means, but for what we're talking about, it's enough to know it basically means that an object is big enough that it has become round due to the force of its own gravity. If you didn't know, that's the simple reason all planets are spheres: that's just the shape big things with lots of gravity become. If a moon of a planet is big enough, it becomes round like a planet, but if it's too small it'll just be a shapeless lumpy rock. See also the millions of asteroids in the Solar System, of which the number which look round can be counted on one hands.

Now geology and determining the presence of hydrostatic equilibrium are very percise sciences which we are trying our best to apply to things which we only have very impercise measurements of. It's hard to study a celestial body when you're only way of going there is by controlling a probe which might get there in under a decade if you're lucky. Because of this, there's a lot of borderline cases on what you could say is "gravitationally round" and therefor a geophysical planet, but for the most part you'll end up with a list that looks something like this:

The Sun (sometimes casually called "Sol" to avoid confusion with other suns)

The eight IAU planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune

Nine consensus dwarf planets: Ceres (the only one which is not past the orbit of Neptune), Orcus, Pluto, Haumea, Quaoar, Makemake, Gonggong, Eris, and Sedna

Earth's satellite: The Moon (sometimes casually called "Luna" to avoid confusion with other moons

Four satellites of Jupiter, popularly known as the Gallaelyan Moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto

Seven satellites of Saturn: Mimas, Enceladus, Tehtys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, and Iapteus

Five stallies of Uranus: Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania, and Oberon

One satellite of Neptune...: Triton

...and one satellite of Pluto: Charon

The objects listed above are all referenced in the narrative and mythology of Moonset.

As an aside, there's probably another planet on the distant edges of the solar System. We haven't been able to actually detect any trace of it yet, but it would easily explain a lot of gravitional anomalies that go on around Neptune. It's safe to assume there's at least a couple more gravitionally round satellites around it, too...

When pitted against the total line up of satellites our Solar System - let alone the universe - has to offer, Earth's Moon seems very nondescrept. However it is more unique than initially seems: for one thing, she's the only rounded moon in the inner solar system. Mercury and Venus have no moons at all, and while Mars does have two - Deimos and Phobos - they are exceedingly small and potato-shaped in comparison. Past this, however, the Moon is a statistical anomaly in that she is startingly large.

Now, not just in terms of literal mass, of course; Luna is fairly average sized. However, the other satellites of similar size to her are orbitting much, much bigger planets. Take, for example, Ganymede, the largest moon of Jupiter and in the Solar System. Ganymede has a diameter of 5268 kilometers, quite a bit bigger than our moon's 3476 km. However, Jupiter itself has a diameter of 142984 kilometers. If we do some math, that means Ganymede is ~3.69% of the size Jupiter, which is to say Jupiter is about 27 times bigger. If you repeat this process with the other giants and their biggest moons, you learn that Saturn is 23.4 times bigger than Titan, Uranus is 32 times bigger than Titania, and Neptune is 18 times bigger than Triton.

Earth, on the other hand, is only around three-and-a-half times bigger than the Moon.

On account of how incomprehensibly dense the gas/ice giants are, the differences here get even more extreme if you try measuring by volume: Titan manages to make it all the way up to being 1/4200th of Saturn's mass, while the other three mentioned are - respectively - 1/20000th, 1/25000th, and 1/47850th the volumes of their parent planets. Moon, on the other hand? It's at about 1/49th the Earth's volume. To compare her to the closest moons to her, Phobos - the larger of the pair - only stretches 22 kilometers to Mars' 6780, and has about 1/30000000th the volume. The Moon - for her place in the universe - absolutely huge. Almost without contest.

Enter Charon, the largest satellite of Pluto. Pluto and Charon may as well be twins compared to other planet-moon duos we know of: Pluto's diameter is 2377 km to Charon's 1212, meaning Pluto isn't even twice as big. In terms of volume, Charon has 1/8th that of Pluto. Charon is so big that back in the early 2000s, before the IAU announced the "dwarf planet" disignation, one of the other ideas floated was to classify Pluto and Charon as a binary planet: Two planets which orbit each other, while orbiting the Sun. This of course didn't end up making it into the official nomenclature, so by most counts Charon is still just a moon, but mathmatically? The binary planet idea is right on the money

Astronomy has a concept called a barycenter, which is the center of mass two of things in space that are engaged orbit, and is the point where the orbit technically lies. So for example the Earth doesn't technically orbit the Sun, instead both the Sun and the Earth technically orbit around the Sun-Earth barycenter. However since the Sun is so very big and the Earth is so very small in comparison, said Sun-Earth barycanter is just in the middle of the Sun anyway, so it doesn't make a difference. The same applies to the planets and their very-tiny-by-comparison moons. However Pluto and Charon break that rule! The Pluto-Charon barycenter is not in the middle of Pluto! It is outside both objects! They legitimately orbit each other as equals!

So what of the Earth and the Moon, then? There is a niche but not necessarily unscientific following for Earth-Luna to be called a binary planet system too. However the barycenter measure fails that crowd, as the Earth-Moon barycenter still lays inside of Earth's mass. It makes it about 75% of the way to the surface though, and that's much more than any other planet-moon barycenter which are mostly just within their planet's core. The thing is there's a good arguement that you don't have to make the barycenter the end-all-be-all determiner, though! You see as it turns out, Jupiter is just big enough and just far away enough from the Sun that the Sun-Jupiter barycenter just barely escapes the Sun's mass. So, by that logic, the Solar System should actually be the Sol-Jovian System, because the Sun and Jupiter are both orbitting a non-Sun point. But of course, that's pretty laughable of an idea to actually entertain.

Our Moon is certainly something special, so special that there's not really a good way to scientifically parse it. She's just an oddity, our little unique gift. How come?

To make a long history of scientific theories short, the current hypothesis is that the Moon is the hollowed corpse of half a planet. The "giant impact hypothesis" posits that early in the Solar System's life span, a "proto-Earth" in an unstable orbit collided with a Mars-like planet dubbed Theia; the resulting impact caused the formation of the Earth as know it due to its gravity merging it with some pieces of Theia. Other parts of the planet exploded with such velocity that they escaped orbit, while the remains coalesced into the Moon. Like most things in astronomy, our understanding of these events are not perfect, and there remains some unexplained discrepencies in even the most advanced models of the Theia impact; nonetheless, it remains the prevailing hypothesis on the Moon's formation. This is contrast to most satellites, which come to form from either leftovers during a planet's creation or passing objects which are captured by a planet's orbit.

I didn't have a good spot to tie this in with everything else, but did you know that the eclipse is also a cosmic coincidence? There is no underlying mechanism which causes the total solar eclipse to occur. It is possibly simply because it so happens that the Sun is both 400 times bigger and 400 times farther from Earth than the Moon. The Moon slowly gets further away from Earth as the cosmic scale of time goes on. In six or seven hundred million years, the total solar eclipse will no longer be able to occur. Us getting to see eclipses seems like just lucky chance...

You've likely heard the term "Fermi paradox": said paradox being, if we know intelligent life (or even just life in general) can exist, why can't we find anymore of it? Many solutions of varying complexity have been floated, but amongst them is the "rare Earth hypothesis". In essence, the conditions which caused life are extremely unlikely to occur, hence Earth being the only place in the universe with life that we know of. One factor of this could be the tidal activity of the Earth - stimulated by the Moon's presence affecting our gravity - kickstarting chemical development of life. Of course, this can't be said for certain, but it is perhaps the case that every beautiful thing that has ever happened in our nature and our lives is the end result of senseless cosmic violence.
Thank you, Theia. I love you, Moon.

Constellations aren't real. There is no actual measure of what makes a constellation, they are completely imagined, completely arbitrary grouping of stars which work only from the POV of someone on Earth. In reality, the stars which make up a constellation are as far away from each other as they are from Earth. Their place in our sky is just cosmic chance, and yet we took those random lights and drew our stories and icons onto them.

If you're not already an astronomy nerd, you're probably familiar with just a few constellations. Most likely would be the twelve which make up the western zodiac: Aries (ram), Taurus (bull), Gemini (twins), Cancer (crab), Leo (lion), Virgo (maiden), Libra (scales), Scorpio (scorpion), Sagittarius (archer), Capricorn (seagoat), Aquarius (water bringer), and Piesces (fish). The Zodiac is based on dividing the path the Sun moves through the sky anuually - the ecliptic - into 12 sections, with each zodiac sign corresponding to a constellation within that divison. You may also know Orion, the giant huntsman from Greek mythology, which has a particularly distinct pattern and is useful for navigating and stargazing; Ursa Major, the big bear which contains the North Star (extra fact: This constellation is what the Arctic is named after, since "arkos" is Greek for bear. And thus "Antarctica" is the South Pole where you can't see the North Star. This also lines up with which one literal polar bears live in, but that's another coincidence...); or Sirius, which is a wolf, and therefor pretty rad.

The IAU keeps a list of recognised constellations for the purposes of easily describing which direction from Earth something is located in. This list total 88, about half of which came from Ancient Greece with the other being filled in as the southern half of Earth was explored. Of course, the thing about constellations being entirely imagined is that anyone - even you, reading this! - can make one up. Because of this there are many constellations which were described before the IAU's standardisation of them, which was published in 1930. Two of these are used within the main cast of Moonset alone: The Whispering Stars references Lilium and Cats Don't Dance references Felis, neither of which are on the IAU list. Other obsolete constellations I find particularly fun include Apes the bee ^{(which is actually the exact same stars as Lilium, just as an example of how arbitrary constellation definitions are)}, Aranea the long-legged spider, Globus Aerostaticus the hot air balloon, Noctua the owl, and Officina Typographica the print shop (yes, all of these were real).

There are even more constellations which were used by different cultures. They're actually a fairly universal phenonmea, not at all limited to the Greek tradition which our modern western understanding of constellations is based. Many even used similar or the same star patterns as we know. Aboriginals in what is today Australia saw the Milky Way as a giant emu; the Dakota people interpreted the stars near the Summer Triangle as Agleœka, a salamander. Romanians saw the big dipper as a chariot, and the Norse as a woman's cart. I greatly recommend this website if you'd like to explore more on this topic.

What I find to be the most unique and interesting interpretation of the night sky from across anthropology, though, would have to be that of classical Chinese astrology. So much so that I must dedicate it its own section of this page.

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As discussed earlier, Tsukiko's name is a romanisation of "Moonchild" in Japanese. Ririka does not break this pattern, but discussing the way she fits into it may spoil some of the experience of the narrative.