The clouds are just thick enough to block out sunlight, except on the tallest mountains and some very high flying islands. At the poles (not magnetic poles, but perpendicular to the sun’s rotation) you get months of sunlight or shade in summer or winter, respectively, a bit like Earth’s polar regions and their midnight sun. I haven’t put much thought into the clouds since i had the idea two years and a week ago.

The white hole is one of the things i handwave some details of. I think of it as a black hole moving backward in time, spewing out light and pushing matter away. This relies on the assumption that tachyons have negative mass, and objects with negative mass repel objects with positive mass (or at least attract them while moving backward in time, so it looks like a gravitational push to a forward-time observer). Why it only emits light and nothing else, i don’t know. The point of this is mostly that it acts as a reverse gravitational lens (or “gravitational snel” in my original notes).

Here, an observer (eye) can see an object (star) by looking right at it, or by looking almost straight up at the sun. The object would appear to be smeared across the sky, getting brighter and smaller closer to the sun. In practice it’s not quite that neat, as part of the world is always covered by clouds, and things that are really far away are hard to see in detail. But this is basically how the sky is distorted.