18 Jan 2018 12:09
I found some planemos with tidally heated moons that are so hot that they illuminate the surrounding system. However, the lighting is weird - they emit light but they don't actually seem to glow. They'll reflect the light cast from nearby super-heated "incandescent" worlds though (while not glowing themselves) and the light they cast seems to have a distance limit related to temperature, beyond which it disappears abruptly. Thus satellites in other orbits around the planemo will only be illuminated while within the lighting range of the incandescent moon - or if the moon is close enough to the primary then that will be illuminated but if it's too far then it won't be.
I'm thinking that maybe SpaceEngine is thinking that since the system is a planemo system, that when there is an object hot enough to give off light, that it will calculate the light like a star giving off light, but since it is not
classified as a star, it has a dark side. Either way, I think this may be a lighting bug, but don't quote me on it.
"You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”- Carl Sagan