Welcome back to part 3 of the Procedural Calendar Generation series. In the first part we looked on how to compute celestial body position in a simple two-body system. The second part, instead is crash course on ellipse geometry.

In this part, instead, we will tackle a fascinating consequence of the cosmic dance of our planet around its sun: seasons. Seasons are a strange beast because their behavior depends on a huge amount of factors. We are used to our four seasons with mild springs and autumns, hot summers and cold winters. But these four season are just the consequence of our planet ecosystem, atmosphere, the peculiar axial tilt, if the orbit is particularly eccentric, distance from the sun in different period of the year can be a strong modifier too! In multi-star system, we can have more than 4 seasons, in planets with strange mechanics we can not have seasons at all (or better, the “season” depends on where are you on the planet).