Ian  S.  Bott

Elysium has an axial tilt of 88 degrees.

What does that look like?

Earth has a 23 degree axial tilt, which means that at midsummer/midwinter the poles are tilted 23 degrees towards or away from the sun. This tilt gives us our seasons.

Near the equator, day and night are roughly the same length no matter what time of year it is. But the further away from the equator you go, the greater the difference between summer and winter hours of daylight. When you cross the Arctic or Antarctic circles - lines of latitude 23 degrees from the poles - something strange happens. You get periods of round-the-clock daylight in summer and darkness in winter. The closer to the poles you travel, the longer those spells of continuous light and dark last. The poles themselves see close to six months of light and six months of dark.

On Elysium, this picture is taken to extremes. The Arctic and Antarctic circles would actually run along the equator, and everywhere other than the equator will be a “land of the midnight sun”, even if only briefly at the lower latitudes.

Because the planet’s spin is in line with the plane of its orbit, the motion of the sun in the sky will look very strange compared with what we are used to. At midsummer, the planet’s axis is pointing right at the sun, so the sun will be stationary in the sky - directly overhead at the summer pole, or hovering on the horizon if you’re at the equator. This will make for ferociously long and hot summers at the poles.

As the year progresses, the sun will start to move in increasingly large circles in the sky, a bit like the handle of a spinning top that’s losing speed and starting to topple over. Sooner or later, depending on what latitude you’re at, those circles will dip below the horizon and you’ll get a few weeks or months of a true day/night cycle ... until the sun vanishes below the horizon for good and you go into a much longer night.

Why doesn’t one of Elysium’s poles always point at the sun?