Neil Aquila

Continent: North America
Ability: master planner and record tracking
Main instrument: sextant

Story:

Neil is an American army test pilot. He has some experience as a navigator on several flight carriers and he has witnessed the Russian Zond 5 capsule recovery, housing two tortoise cosmonauts, during a spying mission on the USS Mc Morris. Clearly his continent wasn’t the only one preparing to conquer the Moon. Cosmonauts Arman Cherepakha and Teplova Ekran were the first to flyby the Moon and return safely back to Earth. Neil’s first mission is to beat the European Russians in space techniques by orbiting the Moon several times before return. Once the American lunar lander design has been completed, he will command a landing on the lunar surface. His favourite guiding star formation while soaring high in the atmosphere as a test pilot is the Summer Triangle.

João Luna

Continent: South America
Ability: expert in celestial transits like eclipses and Venus transits with solar protection techniques
Main instrument: armillary sphere to compare the moon to the ecliptic

Story:

Brazilian jaguar João Luna has been haunted by the blood moon ever since puberty and one day he has discovered that his Mayan ancestors have fled to the Amazon rainforest in the south, as a result of being feared by the human population. His own bloodline seems to be originated from the Jaguar God of the Underworld. His attraction to the Moon has been a calling, like a thirst for blood. What truth lies beneath this emotion?

To make more sense of this, he started to study the celestial mechanics on a 1800 armillary sphere. The brass instrument was made in London and donated by a Portuguese delegation in 1815, when the colony Brazil was elevated to the rank of kingdom upon the formation of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves.

This armillary sphere is of particular interest to João, because the Sun and the Moon are included. Somehow this instrument seems to quench some of his mad driving thirst.

Yuri Newton

Continent: Europe
Ability: master telescope builder who combines observing with planning
Main instrument: reflector telescope for planetary observations

Story:

Yuri is a British sheep, born in ‘Mother Russia’. Because of his great talent for physics, Newton was the first to crack the mathematical formula for space flight. After the victory of launching the first satellite in space, Yuri took the challenge in being the first to have ever reached space and return successfully back. His best friend, comrade Arman Piñata Cherepakha, has set the next victory with comrade Teplova Ekran by performing a lunar return flyby.

Yuri is confident to get the physics and techniques fast for a lunar landing. The world is watching with anticipation whether Arman or Yuri will land on the Moon first. Other continents are joining the competition as well.

Like his friend, Newton became very famous for his instrumental skills during astronomical observations.

He is also known as the gravity defying sheep. Among astronomers a new joke goes around: ‘At night you either count stars or count sheep!’

Leo Maseko

Continent: Africa
Ability: master telescope builder who's expertise lies in constellations outside the all too bright Milky Way band in Africa's dark sky
Main instrument: refracting telescope for lunar observations

Story:

Leo is a South-African lion, and aspires to be first to set his paws on the lunar surface. With his telescope he obsessively observes structures on the lunar surface. During his childhood his dad told him a story dating back thousands of years involving Sphinxes, mystical instruments like the Egyptian Merkhet and a star called Thuban. This star would have been the previous polar star 4500 years ago.

One of his goals is to trace back an astrolabe that would have the markings of a 15th century hidden treasure of a Syrian-Egyptian sphinx. No human believes anymore that such mystical creatures ever existed. Nevertheless, he thinks he has found the current owner of the object. But what he doesn't know, is that the object is not a disk, but rather an orb. The only Persian Spherical Astrolabe left is in the History of Science Museum in Oxford …

Wang Xiongmao

Continent: Asia
Ability: Lunar observations give her more navigation knowledge and she has record tracking
Main instrument: Guo Shoujing's Jianyi for precise star mapping

Story:

As a Chinese astronomer at the Beijing Observatory, Xiongmao studies stellar occultations by the Moon starting from the Yuan Dynasty. In order to understand the old observations, she managed to grasp a deep understanding of ancient Chinese instruments. This way she tries to keep track of the Asian Lunar Calendar while developing new navigational techniques involving moon houses for a voyage to the Moon. To apply these techniques she has been assigned as the first female taikonaut to prepare reaching for the Moon.

Tracing old documents, she also discovered several medieval accounts of Asian observations of a supernova explosion in the constellation Taurus, known today as the Crab Nebula, a remnant of the event.

Jarrah Walker

Continent: Oceania
Ability: fast travelling by sea with solar protection techniques
Main instrument: Persian astrolabe to compare star positions

Story:

Jarrah is an Australian Koala and used to be an anthropologist, studying human migrations across the world. The decay of old stellar Aboriginal tradition is influenced by human migration and to illustrate this, she would bring up the fading knowledge about the position of an emu bird in the sky, like a dark constellation in the Milky Way, indicating the right season to get emu eggs, by luring the males away from guarding the nest with an emu caller.

As a teenager rite of passage, she chose to experience her Walkabout on the Pacific Ocean. Fascinated by how Aboriginal tradition was passed on for centuries through the sky, she fancied becoming a star navigator on the Hokule’a. This Polynesian canoe’s primary goal was to explore the anthropological theory of the Asiatic origin of native Oceanic people, and because a voyage was always completed with exclusively Polynesian navigation techniques, her future was destined to be written in the stars. A Syrian colleague gave her an ancient Persian astrolabe for one of her new researches.

Sphen Easydive

Continent: Antarctica
Ability: uses 'Antarctic squirrel' helicopters and has record tracking
Main instrument: Captain Cook's octant for predictions of stellar positions

Story:

The director of the International Astronomical Union is known as a very stiff character, but with a stylish dress habit and an obsession for etiquette. Sphen Easydive is also in the possession of Captain James Cook’s legendary octant. History has left us with the story of Cook's two missions in the 18th century. One was a public mission to observe the Venus transit in Tahiti to determine the distance of the Earth from the Sun, and the other was a secret mission to search the south Pacific for signs of the postulated 7th continent, known as ‘Terra Australis’. Sphen claims his octant to have been scooped up at Pine Island Glacier by one of his ancestors. Scientific analyses and historic research confirm the instrument's origins. Besides this curiosity, Sphen is known for popularizing astronomy via his many famous books and for his weird jetpack and underwater exosuit inventions. It seems the stiffness is being balanced out by Sphen’s lust to test his crazy ideas.

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