Alien Sky - Television Tropes & Idioms

There has been a malfunction in Project Flashlight with devastating results.

So you've used the Time Travel machine on "random", "borrowed" the professor's rocket ship, or walked through the strange glowy doorway. OK, everything seems normal, but for some reason you can't get your bearings. When you look up... it's an Alien Sky.

Used to bring home the fact that the heroes (and viewers just tuning in) are in another world! Maybe there are two moons. Perhaps Earth's all-too-familiar moon, the one in all the love songs, is broken into so many pieces it's become a ring of debris around the planet. More subtle cues are to change the background color of the night sky with nebulae or intensely bright stars. Having the planet orbit huge gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn that dominate the sky isn't rare, either. In the daytime, the sky could be a lovely shade of purple instead of blue (which would mean that air is different from Earth), the sun could be a different color, or it could have a little and a bigger brother (as improbable as that may be in real life). Sometimes used to comedic effect when our heroes just won't believe they've left Earth for good, and shrug off all other, often painfully obvious, hints as some kind of Masquerade ("Wow, great special effects! I'm on hidden camera, right?").

See also Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale, which is sometimes invoked for some of the more bizarre sky-types. Compare Zeppelins From Another World.

Examples:

Anime

Two moons in Zero No Tsukaima and Seirei No Moribito.
A huge, red sun in Now And Then Here And There.
In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, Midchilda seems to have, conservatively-speaking, at least six Earth-like planets hanging in its sky for absolutely no discernible reason. A number of other planets they visited in the previous season also have this unusually populated skyscape.
Vision Of Escaflowne had Earth hanging in the sky.
The Digital World in Digimon Frontier had three moons.
- The Digital World in Digimon Savers had rocks floating in the sky and it sometimes had electronic textures on it.
Manabe Johji's Capricorn is set in a Lunar-like alternate dimension in which our Earth is visible in the sky over the moon. The moon is itself a planet with Earth's density and gravity, if not its size.
A variation: It's not the sky which tells Youko that she's arrived in the world of The Twelve Kingdoms, it's the alien-looking sea. Later in the series, she flies to a palace on a high mountain and discovers there's another (watery) sea above the clouds.
- Similarly, it's the not so much the sky itself in Eureka Seven that looks alien, but the luminescent clouds of light particles that blow across it. The ground's not exactly normal, either, what with the huge chunks of coral-like stuff jutting out of it. Against all odds, though, it's apparently still Earth.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann played the double moon version during a chapter with the Moon and the Hyper Galaxy Dai-Gurren.
Darker Than Black has as part of the back story that the normal sky of the Earth disappeared when Hell's Gate opened ten years ago, taking with it all man-made constructs found above the Stratosphere (though strangely enough, the sun still works). Attempts to reclaim space only result in silence from whatever is sent up there. Instead, the stars in the night sky are all artificial and bound to a particular contractor, blinking as the contractor uses its power and falling from the sky when the contractor dies.
Simoun takes place on a planet in a binary star system, which accounts for the Fashionable Asymmetry in the clothes design of the Sybillae.
In Dragonball Z, Namek has a green sky (and blue grass).
- Not to mention three suns.
In Stellvia Of The Universe space, and thus the night sky, is green now. This is justified in that Earth is in a part of space still suffering the effects of the supernova explosion of the star Hydrus Beta ( which almost destroyed human civilisation ) and so occupies what seems to be a nebula. Space changes colour again later on.
Cowboy Bebop has a cracked moon in Earth's sky and tons of debris that rains down upon the Earth on a daily basis. Of course, few people live there, opting instead for other, terraformed bodies in the Solar System with even weirder views of the heavens.
Allison And Lillia has, in addition to its Alien Geography, a moon which is much closer to the Earth, orbiting every eight days and producing spectacular solar eclipses on a disturbingly frequent basis. Strangely, however, calendar months are still roughly 30 days long...
In Trinity Blood, Earth has two moons: the normal moon, and a new "Vampire Moon", which is the colony ship the Methuselah used to travel to Mars and back.
End of Evangelion ends up with Earth surrounded by reddish ring made of blood. The sky looks even worse in the middle of the film.

Film

Star Wars had Luke framed against a simple but gorgeous twin sunset in the first movie—it's the first shot in the film to really drive home the point that this isn't Earth, and succeeds spectacularly, despite being one of the film's simplest effects - it's just a double exposure of a real sunset. It also featured the rebel base on an Earth-like moon orbiting a giant, red gas-planet.
The 2002 remake of The Time Machine had a cracked moon and debris field circling the Earth, the product of the man-made disaster that prompted the Morlock/Eloi Earth in this version.
The Dark Crystal makes a big deal out of the Great Conjunction of the Triple Sun, during which time huge world-changing events are known to occur.
The Quiet Earth (see the illustration) ends with Zac on an alien world, or radically changed Earth, immediately obvious because of the weird clouds and ringed planet rising in the sky.
The unnamed planet in Pitch Black has three suns, which causes it to be constantly daytime, except once every 22 years, when there is a triple eclipse. One also has to wonder how the photophobic creatures that menace the characters afterwards managed to survive after killing off the surface creatures. (maybe they are nocturnal as well, and everyone hibernates! Anything's possible, but what matters is that it was scary and dark) The gas giant it orbits also has two sets of rings parallel to each other, which isn't even physically possible.
- The creatures were shown to emerge from underground, it can be assumed that's where they normally lived.
The world Krull rotated around two suns. There were no double-shadows, we never saw the sky enough to find both suns, and there was no plot-significant reason for there being two suns. It was just cool.
The Reveal in Galaxy Quest, when the huge dome opens and Taggart finally realizes where he really is.

Television

The Sliders episode "State Of The A.R.T." changed the color of the sky to Lilac. The Ridiculously Human Robot gives it a Handwave about pollution particles— not one that makes scientific sense, of course, but at least it was acknowledged.
Space 1999 actually takes place on the moon after it's been blasted out of Earth orbit and the solar system.
Doctor Who: Pick an alien planet, it's there.
- The Time Lord homeworld Gallifrey is perhaps the most well-known example with its fabled "burnt orange sky", although the Doctor never arrives there at random (and it isn't shown on-screen much at all).
- An early example was the planet Vortis, in "The Web Planet", which had an atmosphere so thin that the stars (and multiple moons) were visible during the day.
- During the eighties, a particular new postproduction technique resulted in a minor run of planets with pink skies, including Thoros Beta in "Mindwarp" and the unnamed planet in "Survival".
- A story arc in the eighteenth season upped the ante with a trip to another universe - where, of course, all the planets had a particular sort of alien sky.
  - Only at night - space was green in that universe (and since it was later established that inter-universe portals were built to drain off entropy, entropy is green.
- Recently, in The Stolen Earth - Earth is stolen by the Daleks, and moved across the universe to the Medusa Cascade. Characters look up to see 26 planets in the sky instead of the Sun, Moon and familiar stars, giving Earth an Alien Sky.
Pylea in Angel has two suns, not that we see either more than once. Conveniently for any vampires present, neither are of the undead-frying variety.
The Land Of The Lost has three moons (and sometimes two suns), but given what's learned about the Land during the series, they may not be exactly... real.
Planet Hell (the "planetary surface" soundstage) from Star Trek The Original Series, which always had a different-colored backdrop. I mean, sky.
- And the "demon-class" planet, which had both Alien Sky and Alien ground.
- An egregious example is when Vulcan was seen in Star Trek The Motion Picture with two really big moons in the sky, even though it had previously been said that Vulcan doesn't have any moons. A Fan Wank Ret Con turned these into a sister planet with its own moon.
Stargate SG 1 loves putting many moons and big moons into an alien sky - probably because nine-tenths of the planets look like British Columbia, so you have to show variation somehow. The trend started in the Stargate film, where Abydos has three moons.
- The only trouble is that these moons are usually bigger and closer than our own, and Earth's moon is already towards the big-and-close end of the moon spectrum - any bigger and closer and our tides would probably become massively destructive.
- This only applies to the planets of the same size. If the planes is lesser, a moon the same size displays bigger.
Firefly does this all the time, as the series is set in a solar system with lots of gas giants and habitable moons. The "first episode" features, in its first scene a celestial object hanging in the sky that you really wouldn't want to see on Earth, because it would mean the moon had suddenly and drastically reduced the distance between itself and Earth and altered its surface features.

Video Games

Skies Of Arcadia deserves a special mention here. Six moons (and no visible sun, despite there being a normal day/night cycle), and they're arranged in such a way that you can only see each one in a particular region of the world. Besides the Moons hanging over their country of choice, just try to fathom how that map works when you really think about it. (The two ends of Glacia should not be connected to each other if the world is round...) Of course, the game is premised on the assumption that there's no ocean and all the landmasses of the world are floating in the sky, so maybe we should just relax.
- This troper always assumed they were in some bizarre sort of gaseous planet (not a giant because they wouldn't survive.) Also, this can be easily (although not practically or probable in any way) explained by the fact the these moons orbits were geosynchronous.
Lunar takes place, appropriately enough, on the moon, so it has a huge floating Earth in the sky.
The Ratchet And Clank series, taking place on multiple worlds, naturally gives a good number of odd skies to look at when you're not blowing everything to Kingdom Come.
One of the many links between Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Phantasia is the names of Phantasia's two moons: Sylvarant and Tethe'alla, the names of the two worlds in Symphonia. When the original world was split in two, the residents of each world named the one moon that remained in their world after the other world, to "explain" where the missing people went. This caused some confusion when someone from the world of Tethe'alla came to Sylvarant (whose people had long forgotten about the other world).
The world of Chrono Cross has six moons, each one represented by a Dragon God.
Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri has a binary star system. Though the sky is rarely shown in the cutscenes, one of the stars reaches perihelion every 20 years, causing Planet's native life to pester your bases even more.
- The 20 year bit is a case of Did Not Do The Research: The real Alpha Centauri system has an orbital period of almost 80 years (for the two main stars – Proxima's far enough and dim enough to be hard to spot, and has an orbital period of at least 100,000 years if it's even in orbit at all). Assuming Planet years doesn't work either – if its year was four Earth years it would be colder than Mars.
  - More likely it's a bow to the RuleOfFun. An 80-year cycle wouldn't come up very often during the span of an ordinary game. Shortening it to 20 years makes it more interesting and relevant to the player.
In Drakengard, after the final seal is broken, the world's sky turns from a happy blue to a blood-red. This also accompanies fireballs that rain from heaven and explode with the force of a nuclear blast, turning your recent major military victory into a devastating loss.
The first few levels of Serious Sam: The Second Encounter are supposed to take place in South or Central America, on our Earth, in the Mayan age. However, as you near the end of this set, the sky goes completely dark, and a bit later on the night-time sky is blue-purple and... is that a nebula? Cool and beautiful but quite bizarre.
The Elder Scrolls Series features two moons in the sky: Masser and Secunda. One of these moons is reddish-brown while the other is grey. The constellations and nebula shown on the night sky are also completely different, creating a beautiful spectacle that can sometimes lead to players just standing around at night doing nothing but watching the sky. Or maybe that's just me.
- Even the daytime skies in The Shivering Isles are strange.
- In the second game, the sky would occasionally turn green for a few hours, with no reason given. Perhaps it was a bug; perhaps it was intentional and meant to drive home the point that Tamriel isn't Earth.
- Concept art and early beta footage of Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind having a daytime sky that is a pleasant shade of orange. This was scrapped in favor of a normal blue one.
The world of Final Fantasy VIII has a fairly normal blue sky with one moon... except that the moon is enormous, taking up at least a quarter of the sky in most of the backdrop images. It is also, as the characters learn during the third disc, covered with monsters, and the "Lunar Cry" which carries those monsters to the planet below causes the planet-facing side of the moon to temporarily sport a huge blood-red spot with a milky white center that makes it look like a giant alien eye.
In The Legend Of Zelda game "Majora's Mask", an intimidating moon growing ever-larger in the sky served as both a timepiece and to remind players that (despite widespread recycling of character models) they're in the parallel world of Termina, not in Hyrule.
Grandia II has a moon similar to ours, and a smaller red one — Valmar's Moon. You get to land on it.
Jak And Daxter: the (unnamed) planet has a green sun. No, the colours aren't all screwy. In the third game, a second one appears. This one is purple.
Final Fantasy IV follows the "one normal moon like Earth's, one special plot-related moon you get to visit" pattern.
- The game confirms that the world of Final Fantasy IV is Earth, and that the Lunarians on the second moon (which wasn't always there) came from a planet that was between Mars and Jupiter before it was destroyed, causing the Lunarians to move to a second moon orbiting Earth. The moon that the heroes don't get to visit is the one that exists in real life.
The titular Halo of the game series has a sky that looks like a normal Earth sky....except that you can see the horizon curling up and narrowing in the distance, stretching up above you, and coming back down around to the other side.
- When you reach the Ark in Halo 3, the sky is blue but stars are visible. The Milky Way itself dominates the skyline.
The world of Wild Arms contains two moons. The usual boring old moon, and the new moon Malduke which is actually a huge orbiting military base built by the precursors and also serves as the very definitely final dungeon.
Doom features several variations on a red sky for Fire And Brimstone Hell. One sky is even made out of screaming, grimacing faces.
Mass Effect. One of the few things that was unique about the otherwise cookie-cutter secondary planets were the sometimes awesome exotic skies. This is particularly true with moons.
Unreal. Some of the most breathtaking skies ever seen in a videogame, especially for the time.
Although it was never seen on screen, the manual of Tass Times in Tonetown (a game mostly set in a Totally Radical dimension) mentions a triangular moon.
World Of Warcraft has Alien Skies all over the place. Often, merely walking from one zone into the next is enough to turn the sky a completely different color (ostensibly it's always an effect of smoke or haze or the like, but it's far more dramatic than this could account for). The skies of Outworld are even more exotic (and utterly gorgeous), full of an effect akin to a particularly dramatic aurora.

Western Animation

Thundarr The Barbarian actually had a plot-related reason for its Alien Sky: The moon was broken in half by a "runaway planet" passing between the Earth and the moon, plunging the world into a new dark age. This gave many tropers copious amounts of Nightmare Fuel in their youth, especially as the show indicated it would happen in the far-off year of 1994.
The planet in Transformers: Beast Wars had two moons. But, of course, one wasn't really a moon, revealed as part of the Planet Of The Apes Ending of the first season.
The Futurama episode "My Three Suns" took place, appropriately, on a planet with three suns, one of which stretched from horizon to horizon. The humans and robot had no problems functioning there, though it was Death-Valley-level hot. In the Alternate Universe episode "The Farnsworth Parabox", the second universe has a psychedelic-colored sky.
- Any differences between the two universes were caused by coin-flips going one way instead of the other. That must have been some coin-flip...
- Amusingly, later in the Alternate Universe episode there's a shot of the (alternate) Earth from space, and it shows that the weird psychedelic sky is only a small patch over New New York. The rest of the planet looks normal.
Most Filmation shows set in outer space have planets with green skies.
An interesting variant in Superman The Animated Series. It's a cloudy day, and Luminous taunts Superman, saying he can bring Superman to normal human levels. Indeed, Superman has been getting weaker and weaker. Finally Superman goes outside city limits to punch rocks and the clouds break. And that's when it hits him...the sun is RED.

Comic Books

The setting of the Elfquest comics also has two moons — and is called the World of Two Moons, in honor of the fact.
The planet Elekton in The Trigan Empire has two moons and two suns.

Literature

Jennifer Fallon's Second Sons [sic] series takes place on a planet with two suns. The driving event of the story is one sun eclipsing the other for a period of many years, allowing a corrupt cult to take over the world.
The novelizations of Magic The Gathering's Mirrodin block had the four moons (corresponding to four of the five colours of mana) as its main plot element. The third set in the block, Fifth Dawn, is about what you'd expect.
Isaac Asimov's short story (and later, novel) Nightfall takes place on Lagash, a planet with six (!) suns and one moon. This is a major plot point, as when the moon eclipses the sole sun remaining on one side of the planet (as the others have all set), Lagash's people go insane, not being used to the darkness, and destroy their civilization; this, according to the novel, happens once every 2049 years.
- They must feel like idiots when the "night" is over.
  - Noooo... because, they're, you know, insane. These are a race of people who have no concept of darkness. Though the astronomy of such a star system should mean that one side of the planet is dark during the eclipse anyway.
  - From what I can recall the only reason the cycle was so long was because it could only happen where there was (rarely) a single sun in the sky - thus the other half of the planet would be illuminated by the other six suns. Plus, wasn't it a planet on an eccentric orbit, not a moon?
  - Actually it was not (just) the darkness that drove the people insane; it was the millions of stars hanging in the night sky that destroy their mind.
  - It had been suggested there might be other star systems, as many as twenty or even a hundred! One protagonist whistles at how there being another hundred star systems would shrink their world into insignificance. Unfortunately for them their system was far closer to their galactic core than Sol is to ours and as you get closer to the galactic core the density of star systems increases. Seeing a night sky like that visible from Earth would have been a shock as that would have been far more stars than their highest estimate. Seeing a night sky with hundreds of times as many, thousands or tens of thousands as many as they thought would shrink them into insignificance, well…
The Dragonlance novels are set in Krynn, a planet which initially has three moons. Each one has a color, the larger one is white, the medium one is red and the smaller one is black, and also invisible on regular circustances. Sometimes the moons align and make a "eye" in the sky.
The Andalite Chronicles, a prequel to Animorphs, has a piece of Phlebotinum create a small universe based on the memories of the main characters. The sky is a patchwork of bright blue with fluffy clouds (Loren), deep red (Elfangor), and sickly green with lots of lightning (Esplin 9466).
Near the end of Monica Hughes's Invitation To The Game, the small tribe of main characters believes they're still in a virtual-reality world until they realize that they can see the Milky Way from outside it, and there's no moon.
Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover has four moons and a dark red sun, colloquially known as "the bloody sun."
Dragaera's sky is covered with a reddish-orange overcast for some reason. Also, in Issola, this is one of the weird quirks of the place they're trapped.
- The overcast is apparently a side effect of the use of sorcery.
Played with in The Chronicles Of Amber; sky color is one of the ways to tell where you are when walking between worlds.
The "pre-reviz" Magic The Gathering novels—written and released before the Mirage block was released and Weatherlight ended up heavily revising what people thought they knew about the setting—features, as the main setting, a world with two moons.
In the Warworld series, the Alien Sky is an important plot point, as the moon Haven has a day/night cycle 87 hours long, so having a heat-radiating Brown Dwarf in the sky can mean the difference between freezing to death and merely losing a few toes.
- Another Co Dominium setting is the twin planets of New Washington and Franklin, which are tide-locked so that each sits unmoving in the same part of the sky every day when seen from the surface of the other.
In the Riverworld series, the sky is moonless, but has brighter stars than Earth, including some still visible in the daytime.
Ringworld's sky is dominated by the Ring, and "night" is produced by the Shadow Squares, which means no native has ever seen the stars without leaving the Ringworld.
Used in the Star Wars Expanded Universe to drive the point home as to just how powerful the Yuuzhan Vong are - they take one of Coruscant's moons and shatter it, turning it into a planetary ring. (Which was apparently forgotten about after NJO ended. Maybe they took it down.)
Rond, the setting planet of The Lonely Winds has two moons, one a volcanic hell, while the other has been hinted at being inhabited.
Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is set so far into Earth's future, the terraformed Moon is covered in green forests, and the sun has dimmed to the point that stars are visible in the daytime.

Tabletop Games

Many Dungeons And Dragons settings have multiple moons.
- Greyhawk has two moons.
- Dragonlance has three morally-aligned moons — Solitari (good, white), Lunitari (neutral, red), and Nuitari (evil, black) — but only so long as the gods are around.
- Eberron has a whopping twelve moons, and it is said that there was once a thirteenth. To top it off, it also has a ring composed of dragonshards.
- The Forgotten Realms, while only having one moon (Selûne), has visibly trailing behind it a string of meteors/meteorites (called Selûe's Tears). Plus, it's also worshipped as a goddess.
Warhammer features a world with two moons, one normal looking, the other a sickly, evil green.
- The green moon is actually made entirely out of the powerful, but incredibly dangerous magical substance known as Warpstone.
In the home of the gods in Exalted, the sky changes depending on which god is currently winning the Games of Divinity.
- Also, it has Malfeas, home to The Legions Of Hell, whose fake sky is lit by a green sun, which is itself an exceptionally powerful demon.

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