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Description
Further excursions to other extra-solar planets can be viewed in my DA "Paleo & Sci Illo" gallery:

[link]

Thulelune is a rather lonely place. This scene depicts the north pole of one of three large moons orbiting a small gas giant that has roughly 0.5 Uranus masses. The moon itself is between Mercury and Mars in size. It has a thin cold atmosphere of carbon dioxide and Nitrogen.

As the parent planet has almost no axial tilt, its moons do not experience seasons. Therefore ices do not cap the poles. Instead the poles of Thulelune are blanketed in vast dune fields. Low gravity permits the dunes to pile as high as small mountains. The surface is otherwise featurless.

Here lies the only signpost at this twilight zone. It is a large nickle iron meteorite that fell onto Thulelune eons ago. It still bears the destinctive pitted surface caused by atmospheric friction that ablated parts of it away. Over millions of years the fine sand has further eroded it into a windowed "ventifact". As the dunes drift about the pole they alternately bury and expose this space rock for millenia at a time.

text & art (c) John P. Alexander

Description
Further excursions to other extra-solar planets can be viewed in my DA "Paleo & Sci Illo" gallery:

[link]

Thulelune is a rather lonely place. This scene depicts the north pole of one of three large moons orbiting a small gas giant that has roughly 0.5 Uranus masses. The moon itself is between Mercury and Mars in size. It has a thin cold atmosphere of carbon dioxide and Nitrogen.

As the parent planet has almost no axial tilt, its moons do not experience seasons. Therefore ices do not cap the poles. Instead the poles of Thulelune are blanketed in vast dune fields. Low gravity permits the dunes to pile as high as small mountains. The surface is otherwise featurless.

Here lies the only signpost at this twilight zone. It is a large nickle iron meteorite that fell onto Thulelune eons ago. It still bears the destinctive pitted surface caused by atmospheric friction that ablated parts of it away. Over millions of years the fine sand has further eroded it into a windowed "ventifact". As the dunes drift about the pole they alternately bury and expose this space rock for millenia at a time.

text & art (c) John P. Alexander