It's hard to show in the comic, because you can't see the actual distances, but on this picture, the "Holon moon" is much closer to the imaginary camera than the visible surface of the "sun". As you can see on the size chart, there would be no way to show both sun and moon in the same panel without this little trick. (Even if the moon was only one pixel in diameter, the sun would be over 2000 pixels wide - and this page is only 800 px wide!) And the alien is a bit behind the moon, but not much - so, alien creature and moon are almost in scale.
Because of its much smaller mass, the moon is not on a steady orbit, but rather, it's tumbling into the sun, albeit very slowly.
"Sun" and "moon" are just place-holders for what these objects actually are. That'll be revealed at a later time. But for now, you can think of the rock on which (or rather: into which) the "Holon" station is built as something very much akin to our moon, if only about half as large. This constellation is pretty much as if our moon was directly in orbit around our sun.
I should also mention that on this page, just as on many others in this comic, we're dealing with extreme zooms and cuts. Scale-wise, cutting from the exterior to the interior here is pretty much akin to what Kubrick did on the timeline, cutting from caveman to the near future in 2001. (Doesn't mean I'd wanna compare myself to Kubrick, but if you've read signifikat, you know what great impression this cut (or rather, the whole movie) has made on me :P) There's an interesting philosophical debate about what movie cuts are - whether they represent something "realistic" (like quickly shutting your eyes, turning your head, then opening them again to look at a different scenery, or even some psychological phenomenon, like switching from one phantasy to another, or one memory to another), or whether they are completely "unrealistic". When the first movies were made, this controversial debate was the basis for some experimental avantgarde film-making. Just wanted to mention it, so my visiting all those seminars wasn't for naught ^_^
Thanks for reading and commenting!
REPLIES:
sux: Haha! Awww, you're saying you don't love him already? ^_^
tRickityHouses: Thank you very much for the kind words and for stopping by!
Lemniskate: Yeah, watching others' poor fortune can be great entertainment :P
Peipei: Thanks a lot ^_^
Zephyrion: It's actually a miniature, but don't tell anybody! ^_^
Jabali: Thank you very much! Perspective is the first thing you can lose track of in space… not that I've ever been there :P
DAJB: Considering all the nice things you've been saying about my other comics, that's a great compliment! Now if only my other comics weren't jealous! ;-)
Genejoke, man in black, metsuke, skreem, mmm bacon0: Thanks!
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