snorkack said:
Wrong order of magnitude. Extremophile plants under shadow of forest and in deep sea endure 2...3 orders of magnitude less than full sunlight, not 5...6.
That WAS an area I was considering bovine excrementing a little bit. (Though I haven't actually got as far as serious examination of flora yet.)
snorkack said:
It would rotate 360 degrees relative to Sun, yes. But note that the moon is not visible only briefly at midnight - it is visible for the whole night and rotates through appreciable angle.
Also, in these 180 degrees orbit, how much does it rotate relative to planet? 180 degrees, or 540?
I think it's easier for me to show, not tell!
(See attachment.)
Something like that? So when the moon completes a 360º orbit of the planet, it has completed a 720º rotation of itself.
On the subject of plants and whatnot, I ahd a read around to see what I could find out. From what I can gather (as the work
here suggests it's back to beyond what I can work out myself!) R Coronae Borealis (the basis for Andorlaine's star) is a G0 supergiant. So the light reaching it is going to be not that far of Sol's, but because it's hotter (hotter than a main sequence), the light it going to be a bit more towards the blue range and less towards the red, yes? (As the investigation suggested that F-types - which a G0 is are pretty close to - would get much moe blue light.)
So, extrapolating, the planet's foilage is going to likely use slightly more blue energy ('cos it's there) and red will be less abdundant). So the photosynthetic colour might be more towards brighter green, yellow or orange (depending how much red or green light it absorbs). Possibly with an adjustment to much darker colours towards the terminator (and a bit beyond where there's backscatter, where you would assume the plants would be nearly black.
Would it be reasonable to postulate as well, that the dense cloud cover (i.e, near the substellar point with the continuous hurricanes) mean that (like seawater) less red light would penetrate through (because the deeper you go, the bluer things get) - assuming thick cloud would absorb light in a similar manner but vastly less magnitude than water, so plants nearer the substellar point would more likely to be red, since red would be lesser use? (Or have I got that backwards, in which case the plants would be bluer...?)
Edit: I actually found a formula on wiki for calculating illuminance from apparent magntiude. The Andorlaine moon puts out about 0.41 Lux (compared to Luna's 0.26 via calculation, which is about right if a very slight touch on the low side (max of 1 from other sources), so the Andorliane moon is indeed getting on for twice as bright.
Most interestinly, I ran it for the Andorlaine sun. It's about as bright as Sol normally, but if it dims by 8 magnitude (which is what RCB does) the lux goes from ≈110000 (more or less the same as Sol) down to 69! That's a pretty huge drop in brightness!
(Fortunately, among the bending due to poorly understood phenomina the IR band is not affected!) So actually, the dimming does make a
big difference.
That points me to the other interesting point though. The plants - having been adapted to this - probably would have a photosynthic substance for doing long wavelength, which they might well synthesise as the light levels drop, meaning that when the sun goes dim, the plants all start changing colour (probably going quite black for the extra absorbtion), as well as there being a sort of migration (since the dimming period I've said or decades to centuries) where their range would change a bit. Possibly the growth rate might drop as well.
All of which would be terrifiying to a primitive society who had no idea what was going on. (Or even a quite advanced one. My premise is that even 21st century civilisation would have problems with that kind of change.)