The Sky over Rolara
The sun, Luna, the Moonwilde, the Shadow Moon, the five wandering worlds and the twelve month constellations, for any hour of any day, seen as Tatharians watch their sky: from Tatharia Capitolina, facing east over Emerald Bay.
The sky at the selected moment
Drag the sky to turn it. To zoom, pinch, use the + and − buttons, or hold Ctrl and scroll.
Keyboard: tab to the sky, then left and right turn, up and down move the clock a quarter hour, Page Up and Page Down change the day, Home faces north, Space plays or pauses. Plus and minus zoom and 0 returns to the full horizon; once zoomed in, Shift with up and down looks higher or lower, and Shift with left or right turns further.
To the eye and through a spyglass
Every Light in the Sky
Brightness is counted the way star charts count it: lower is brighter, and each step is about two and a half times brighter than the next, so the North Star stands at 2 and the faintest star a sharp eye finds on a dark night at 6. A ship’s spyglass, the kind a Tatharian officer carries, makes every star about three steps brighter and shows shapes the eye cannot.
The month constellations
Twelve Figures on the Sun’s Path
Each Tatharian month is marked by the appearance of its constellation. On the evening of the 15th it rises out of the eastern sea as the sun sets behind the western mountains, upright as drawn here; by midnight it stands highest, and it sets behind the mountains on its side.Over Tatharia Capitolina it rises out of the eastern sea on the evening of the 15th as the sun sets behind the western mountains, upright as drawn there. Seen from here the same stars rise over the river plain at a different slant, since this is another latitude. The moons travel through all twelve, so “Luna in the Skull” is a sky anyone in Rolara can see. Pick one to watch it rise.
How this sky is drawn
From the lore. Luna’s 29-day cycle, the Moonwilde’s 13 and the Shadow Moon’s 99 follow the Foundry phase tables, so every phase here matches the table and the Almanac. The Shadow Moon circles backward, rising about a quarter hour earlier each night, and first shows in the sky on Nautae Vae 23, 409 TC. The Moonwilde is a crystal sphere. Five worlds wander among the stars: Xenov, closest in to the sun; Perganis, the third orb; Keiter, whose moon falls through a tunnel bored through it; Motrolara, a gear knocked loose from Mechanus; and Zohiruta, thin because far. Once a year Rolara passes through the Silk Bridge’s stream, its meteors pouring from the Spider. Tatharia lies in the southern hemisphere, where the sun crosses the northern sky: the North Star, Jiaoshe, never rises there, and faint Clavus marks the south pole instead.
What follows from the geometry. The year runs 361 days, so the seasons never drift against the calendar: the winter solstice, Tatharia’s longest night, opens the year, and each month’s constellation rises from the sea at dusk over Tatharia Capitolina in the middle of its month. The moons’ paths tilt off the sun’s and slowly swing, so now and then a moon crosses the sun, and a full moon passes through Rolara’s shadow. Each is worked out for where you stand: the moons are near enough that they sit lower in the sky than they would seen from Rolara’s centre, the Moonwilde by up to three of its own widths. The Silk Bridge streams from the month figure standing overhead at midnight on its peak night, the Spider. The North Star sits inside the sphere, so it shifts as Rolara circles the sun: a third of a degree off the pole, circling it each night, the point it sits off turning once a year.
Working assumptions. The month figures are the DM’s, pinned in a star catalog; the faint background stars are drawn for this page and are not settled lore. The worlds move on circles at an even pace, each as bright as its distance and its lit face allow. The moons keep their phase tables exactly; their tilted paths follow a few steady turns fitted to a fuller reckoning of the sky. Each home has its own ground: Tatharia Capitolina stands on Emerald Bay, with the sea to the east and mountains to the west; Jiaohai stands on a plateau over a river plain, with the river running out to the east, forested mountains to the north-west, terraced hills on the valley’s flanks and the city of canals and roofs below. The lore gives the river valley, the plateau, the canals, aqueducts and irrigated hills, and the Sealed City, the Garden Palace, the History Peak Pagoda and the Dragon Barrier; it names no direction for any of them, so where each stands is this page’s own drawing. North of the equator the page draws Jiaohai’s ground, south of it Capitolina’s. The observer stands in Tatharia Capitolina unless you move them:
Across the whole horizon a moon is a few pixels wide, so the discs are drawn three times their real size, and never so small that a moon could pass for a star. Near the sun and near each other their spacing is magnified the same way, so an overlap on screen is always a true one. Turn magnifying off and zoom in to see everything at true size. Zoomed in under 10 degrees across, the view gathers light as a ship’s spyglass does, which shows Keiter’s moon beside Keiter.