gremlinče

A deer steps into a bedroom doorway where someone is sitting on a bed with a laptop. The deer says, "Don't be mad but I turned into a deer again." The person says, "You're joking." The two lay in bed on separate pillows, face-down. They look at each other, with panels zooming in only on their eyes. The deer has animal eyes with large brown irises almost covering the whites and a large black pupil inside. The person says, "You don't look like a deer to me." The deer stares back, closes its eyes, and says, "how can you even say that." The person falls asleep with a slight smile. The deer can't sleep, gets out of bed, and looks out the window.

Later, the deer is in a green area, nose pointed down at a phone on the ground, narrating, "It isn't easy. Being a deer." Someone is calling, asking, "Hello?" It replies choppily, "Hi. Sorry. I'm not really. ok. Feeling myself. Can somebody cover my shifts this week?" The view zooms out to show the deer is in a green-walled room, looking at the door. It narrates, "It's hard to leave the house." It pushes its face against the handle and continues, "I haven't been outside in days." It looks at an open, stocked fridge, saying, "I don't know what to eat." then lays down in the dark, saying, "I'm worried there's something wrong with me." As it sleeps, the person from earlier opens up the window, making the room bright. The deer says, "mmph. heeey." The person says, "Oh, my dear." and the deer laughs. The person smiles too and pets its head.

The two walk to a house. There are people smiling inside, sitting on a couch and chatting. The person from earlier laughs. The deer narrates, "We go to a party. All my friends are there. It's nice." It goes to a bathroom and stares in the mirror. The comic zooms in on one eye. Its iris is large and dark.

"what is this BABY doing in space!???"

We know now that all the stars in the universe are in motion, and very fast as well, but, they are so far away their apparent motion on the 2D surface we see as the sky is essentially zero. So the vast majority of the surface of a sphere we see looking up at the sky is a fixed tapestry, unchanging, at least on the scale of human lifetimes. It can be carved up into regions, which we call constellations, and which are named for the prominent asterisms in those regions.

"Planet" comes from Greek for "wanderer." The seven planets, in that sense, are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Luna and Sol (the moon and the sun) and they are called wanderers because they "wander" with respect to the fixed stars. We say they're "in" a constellation when they visually appear in that area of the tapestry. It actually tells you where they are in the sky if you want to look for them.

We name other stuff after the constellations they're in too. You may have heard of Proxima Centauri b, an earth-like planet. It orbits the star Proxima Centauri, which is in the constellation Centaurus. Proxima Centauri is in the Alpha Centauri star system, which has three stars, and is labeled on this map. Beta Centauri, another triple star system, is also labeled on this map.

Because the planets are all in the same plane, they only move through 12 constellations. That's the red line on the constellation map. The ISS actually doesn't orbit in the plane of the solar system tho, so I'm pretty sure it's capable of passing through constellations off of the ecliptic. I'm also suspicious that low earth orbit might be close enough to the ground that different locations on Earth's surface would see ISS as being in different constellations at the same time. Here's the ISS orbit inclination, as well as Hubble: