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Post by Gordy101st on Nov 19, 2004 5:34:07 GMT -5
The west is marked by two "fuzzy" clusters of blue-white stars, which appear as two side-by-side crescents or arcs in the sky, points downward. These are called "The Double Daggers" in the Moonsea cities. Some barbarian tribes of the Sword Coast North call these "the Eyes of the Watching Woman", and men of Hill´s Edge speak of "where Selune Looks back". Whatever one calls them true west can be found exactly halfway between the two arcs - heading "straight between the eyes".
The north is marked by an awesome circle of large, bright stars with utter darkness between them, which is known to most folk today as "Mystra´s Star Circle" (her floating Castle of Night, in childrens fairytales, is said to float in the center of the darkness). Due north is marked by the brightest "Brow Star". Other folk of the Realms call this constellation "the Crown of the North", or just the "Cold Crown". Some believe it to be the "Eye of Evil", or "the Hole That Leads To Darkness".
East in the sky is marked by three converging lines of stars, each with a cluster of stars at its outward end, or "point". Where the three lines come together is due east. Folk in the Realms call these stars "The Arrows of the Gods", "the Sun´s Signpost", or "The Caltrop".
South in the sky is marked by a zigzag line of stars that crawls along the horizon, from west to east, beginning with an upswept "head" or bright starry cluster, and ending with a curving "tail" of stars. This constellation is most easily recognized in Anauroch. Folk elsewhere in the Realms do not see this line of stars so clearly; not being on their horizon most of the time it is enmeshed in a tangle of small constellations, and is not thought of as a unit. In Tunland, Cormyr, Iriaebor, and Westgate, however, it is recognized as a star configuration marking the direction "south", and is known respectively as "Faerula", "The Sword of the South", "the Southfires", and "the Lightning Bolt".
This was taken from the accessory FR13 Anauroch by Ed Greenwood.
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Post by EDM Neo on Oct 4, 2008 11:34:06 GMT -5
This is more a matter of personal curiousity then any need for the information, but, does anyone have any other information about the Faerunian cosmos?
Particularly, what is known of the nature of heavenly bodies and so on... is the sun a great flaming ball of gas as ours is, and if so, do people living in Faerun know this? Is the planet they live on roughly sphere shaped as Earth is, and if so, is this widely known? Or is it flat, or something else? What is the moon, and what are the stars to them? Etc, etc.
If this information just doesn't exist, that's fine, I can live without knowing. I was just thinking about it the other day, and decided to ask.
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Post by Munroe on Oct 4, 2008 18:09:48 GMT -5
I have a little information from the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting entry for the Sea of Night. There may be something in another book (there probably is) but I don't know which one, and I'm thinking there's also probably information in the Starjammer setting on it. FRCS (page 230-231): The Sea of Night The last and most fantastic of the lands beyond Faerûn is so close that every Faerûnian has seen it from afar. Above the sky lies a realm of incredible expanse, the so-called Sea of Night, where rivers of stars and worlds both strange and wonderful shimmer like silver fire in the dark.
Stories abound of wizards who seek to climb above the sky and explore its dark waters, of princes ruling castles of argent light, and crystal elf-ships that rise gleaming from the western seas into oceans vaster and more wondrous still when twilight falls over the face of Toril. in a land where wizards make castles fly and clerics bring forth godly miracles, the legendary isles and realms of the night sky are home to the wildest flights of fancy and strangest dreams of all.
Selûne Toril's moon is known as Selûne. Through careful observations and persistent divinations, sages have determined that it circles Toril at a distance of about twenty thousand miles. While Selûne in the sky appears no larger than a human hand held at arm's length, it is a world in its own right, easily two thousand miles across.
Selûne is bright enough to cast pale shadows when full. It is accompanied in the sky by the Tears of Selûne, a number of smaller luminaries that spread across the sky in a great arc trailing the moon. Children's tales tell of pirates in flying ships who come down from the Tears to raid and plunder, but no one takes the stories seriously.
ECLIPSES Selûne's orbit around Toril is almost in the same plane as Toril's orbit around its sun, so solar and lunar eclipses are frequent. Solar eclipses are never annular (the sun's edge cannot be seen during totality) and almost never partial, because Selûne's shadow on Toril and Toril's shadow on Selûne are quite large. Eclipses are thus spectacular but rather commonplace. Inhabitants of any particular land do not always notice such eclipses, since the rising and setting times for Selûne wander across the calendar. Solar eclipses might briefly cause nocturnal beings to awaken, but they quickly return to sleep once daylight returns.
SELÛNE'S PHASES Selûne is full at exactly midnight, the first of Hammer, 1372 DR, and every thirty days, ten hours, and thirty minutes thereafter. The time between successive full moons is, technically speaking, one synodic month, the time from one Sun-Toril-Selûne conjunction to the next. Selûne makes exactly forty-eight synodic revolutions every four calendar years on Toril. Thus, Selûne is full at exactly midnight on the first day of every leap year, and has the same phase on any calendar day four years forward or backward in time.
One Faerûnian holiday, the Feast of the Moon, is held during a full moon that obligingly shows up on or about that day. Because Selûne's synodic period is so close to the actual length of the calendar month, Selûne is full around the first day of each month or on festival days, give or take a day or so. The annual festival days serve to correct discrepancies between the synodic and calendar months, with Shieldmeet providing a necessary correction every fourth year to keep the full moon from sliding deep into each month.
TEARS OF SELÛNE The Tears of Selûne are a collection of hundreds of very small but bright celestial bodies (asteroids) that orbit Toril in Selûne's wake. The Tears act like any such bodies in a Trojan point, meaning that they do not stay in place but actually orbit around a common center in whirlpool fashion. Viewed from above, the Tears appear to be a very large disk of hundreds of assorted bodies, none of any remarkable size. The Tears are visible as points of light like stars, too small for viewers to discern their actual shapes.
The individual orbits of the Tears are not exactly coplanar with the orbit of Toril and Selûne, but they are close. As a result, their appearance in the night sky of Toril is that of a flattened ellipse of bright "stars," trailing Selûne by sixty degrees across the sky, along the ecliptic. Typically, an average human can cover Selûne's image with his clinched fist at arm's length; the Tears, however, appear to span an area of the night sky almost three handspans wide and about three fingers deep at arm's length. The relative positions of individual Tears change from night to night as they orbit their common center.
The Tears are not bright enough to be seen during the day, though Selûne often is. Though the Tears are bright even when Selûne is new, they are not always visible in the night sky, since they too have rising and setting times, and thus might not be up at night. The first Tear rises or sets about four hours after Selûne does. Because it is so long, the full set of Tears takes about three hours to rise or set, from first Tear to last. The combined effect of the Tears is not enough to cast shadows at night.
Like Selûne, the Tears are believed by some sages to be inhabited, through very few people could make a reasonable guess as to who lives there. Fewer still have actually been there and reported back.
The Dawn Heralds For centuries, astrologers have observed the appearance of one or two particularly bright stars close to sunrise and right after sunset. Anadia and Coliar are comtimes known as the Dawn Heralds, although they might just as easily be called the Evening Heralds too. These, two are worlds much like Toril, only closer to Toril's sun and so never observed very far from it in the heavens. Coliar is the larger and the brighter of the two, and also the one usually found higher in the night sky.
Magical vision devices and deep divinations reveal Anadia as a small, amber-colored world with verdant green at the poles. Coliar is a streaky gray-and-white orb, rumored to hold endless oceans beneath a cloud-wracked sky.
The Five Wanderers Deaper in the Sea of Night roam the Five Wanderers, inconstant stars that do not follow a yearly path across the sky as the other stars do. These Wanderers are markedly different from the star-rivers through which they roam; they tend to be larger, brighter, and show wondrous colors and features when scried closer.
Karpri, the nearest, is a sapphire orb with great whitecaps at top and bottom. Sages say that it roams millions of miles from Toril, if such a thing can be believed. Chandos, the next, is a brown-green smudge whose markings change oddly over a few nights' watching. Glyth is a dull gray, but surrounded by a spectacular rign and three lesser bodies, visible only with magical aid. Garden is a tiny green sparkle, rarely seen. The last, H'Catha, seems to be a very large world very far away, a gleam of diamond white.
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And just because I'm INSANE, I even put in the circumflex characters in the proper names after I typed it out. :-)
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Post by EDM Neo on Oct 4, 2008 19:15:02 GMT -5
Neat. Thanks, Munroe, that answers a lot of questions.
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