Setting the sky for the close of Cycle 4…

The Comet's Road — from Jupiter to the ice

Great Year VIII · the Great Month of the Lion ← back to the atlas

What you are looking at

The saga's comet, from its breakup at Jupiter to the strikes on Earth at the close of Cycle 4 and the waves that follow. The breakup, the swarm, the core and every strike are the saga's (CHANGE_LOG Entries 107, 162–165 and 167). The physics they are drawn with is real, and it follows the pattern of the real Taurid meteoroid complex.

How honest the picture is

Distances between the Sun and planets are true to scale; the bodies are drawn far larger than life, or nothing would be visible.
Planets move on circular orbits at their real periods. Only Earth's position is fixed by the story; the others are illustrative.
The swarm's orbit is worked backwards from the direction it arrives from on Day 50, 15° north of the Sun, and set in the 7:2 resonance with Jupiter that the real Taurid swarm keeps. Its clump and band are drawn thicker than life.
Earth's rotation is set so every Day-50 strike site faces the swarm when it is hit. That puts every strike on the Sun's side of Earth, in afternoon, dusk or high-summer twilight.
The breakup happened "many orbits" before Day 50; the saga does not count them, and neither does the model. "Centuries of spreading" compresses them.
Earth shows the coastline at the saga's sea level (65 m below today's) and the ice sheets of that age (Beyer et al. 2020).

Sources

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