The Contradiction of the Sun
Hey y’all, Aubrey here.
A turquoise sky gleaming over a sunny beach.
The Earth, our home, would not be possible without the Sun. The incomprehensibly large and bright and violent engine in the sky that is our star was the oven by which the Earth itself was made. We are, as inhabitants of our solar system, made of star stuff — specifically our star, the Sun.
Our sky’s atmosphere, made of Sun particles, is dyed blue by the Sun’s rays and warmed by the Sun’s heat. Clouds live up there, getting closer to the Sun than we as humans could ever conceive of before airplanes. Yet, even as the lightest of cirrus clouds scrape the top of our troposphere, they are only 0.00000004% closer to our star than we are — an insignificant difference from the star’s perspective.
Clouds shuffling lazily across a blue canvas.
The sheer scale of the Sun is lost on us, to some extent. We may be 100 million miles away from it, but what does that look like? What difference would it make if I told you that the Sun was 100 billion miles away? Can you really rationalize that difference? The Sun can fit about 1.3 million Earths inside. Scale means equally nothing in size as it does in distance.
A heavy sun piercing through a ghost of days gone by.
The Sun contradicts itself in both size and distance. To think that something so large and so far away could be directly responsible for everything we have today, I think we take it for granted.
A park veiled in an even light brought forth through a thick cover of clouds.
I don’t recommend looking at the Sun. Please don’t, actually. There are other ways to appreciate our star without burning your retinas. One way that many people in the past and present have offered praise to the Sun is through art, and, although begrudgingly by some critics, I do consider video games as works of art.
Art is, after all, the interpretation of our experiences, and very few experiences are more universal than the Sun.
A horizon lit aflame by an engorged orange sun.
Scattered through this devlog are images featuring a custom skybox I made for Pigeon SImulator. With it, we can make strongly varied skies and weather patterns to make every level feel that much more unique, that much more special.
This tool is incredibly versatile and expansible, with new features and improvements rolling in often. Be on the lookout for how the Sun and sky in Pigeon Sim change, and the energy the real Sun spent for you to experience it there.