A preview sketch of Earth's future, five billion years or so hence in the twilight of its life …
The sun of the Crepuscule System is the first star observed to have at some point been thought to be a yellow star like Earth's sun that has gone through both its red supergiant stages and is now in the process of shedding its outer layers and actually dying because it has burned out all the hydrogen and nearly all the helium at its core.
Why this star should be 4-6 billion years ahead of what is thought of as the standard sequence, no one knows. Humanity would have needed to be in the general vicinity 120,000 years before now to have observed what is thought of as the beginning of the process between helium-burning yellow variable phase and the last red supergiant stage.
The system gets its name from a word for “twilight” … this picture was taken from the observation post on Crepescule 20, still beyond the first bow shock of the star's final shed. Daylight is forever evening there, the star no longer in the golden glory that makes for broad daylight that our sun gives us on Earth, and because Crepuscule 20 is tidally locked, there is no rotation such that there could ever be night there.
So, ever in twilight for a long, last evening … although the star's previous expansions could not reach as far as Crepuscule 20, its last expansion will scour the system's last planet of its atmosphere and most of its surface as it has done to the inner worlds. The star's outer layers are moving at about the speed of light, so, the long, last evening of the last intact Crepuscule planet will last about two centuries more.
Humanity observes this with awesome dread, knowing that its own heirs, five billion years or so hence if the sequencing we have of star lifetimes is correct, will face their own long, last evening.
These fractal variant siblings in Apophysis 2.09 rendered on dark periwinkle reminded me of the theorized course of stellar evolution concerning stars like our sun and the idea that it will turn into a red supergiant, a yellow Cepheid variable, and an even bigger red supergiant before dying ... the fractal, rendered on twilight blue, is what I imagine seeing in the sky on the last evening before Earth is overrun -- in just eight minutes -- by the bow shock of the first expansion of the first expansion (because Earth is much closer to our sun than the fictional Crepuscule 20 is to its sun)