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Initially, this was only speculation, but, today, I observed its complete passage across the sky and noticed that the moon truly was spinning clockwise on its side. This is going to be a real problem.. The spinning itself won't necessarily hurt the background lore, but the phases are going to be a little off.
For those who don't know, the moons in Oblivion are not 3D objects with a wrapped texture and lighting, but actually flat static images... which makes getting the moon phases to synchronise with the position of the sun really difficult. Now that I know these textures also spin, it makes that task even harder. Maybe it's the shape of the sky itself though. Most games have a "sky-dome", so the path of the moon across its ceiling probably makes it appear to do a full 180 from one horizon to the other. In that case, I guess I'll just have to live with it. Only especially observant players will catch this, but, still, I'd like to create a fully immersive world, so this really frustrates me.
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Very beautiful capture, btw.
I try not to pay attention. Also the huge one is too close & too large to not be torn apart in the gravity fields of the planet. The set up just would not work even if they were made of cheese. Well, maybe if they were made of cheese. Cheese for everybody. ;-)
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Thanks for the explanation, ZekAonar.
@TesaPlus: Decreasing the moon size is a nice suggestion. I may remove moon phases altogether. Since Soteira isn't grey, it would probably make more sense that it would appear non-reflective anyway. As for the spinning/arced motion effect, I could design a custom night sky texture which would include a copy of the moon texture pasted onto it. Since the planet is rotating faster than the moon is orbiting, it shouldn't be zipping across the sky in wide arcs like that, but should appear stationary, moving as a part of the sky texture so that it rises diagonally (to simulate the axial tilt of Nirn/Asuron).
Anyway, I'll see what I can do