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Hitomi grew bored of the comparator fairly quickly and drifted through the air to start climbing on Whips, playing with her stuffed flying wolf along the way. Whips sighed, but tolerated it. He was bigger than everyone else, so she’d bother him less than the others. Besides, there was more of him for her to climb on. He quickly found he could keep her amused by wiggling his rear anchors gently so she had to hold on—and sometimes came off to drift away, so Hitomi had to bounce her way back, giggling.
    It was still somewhat distracting, but he was able to focus on the comparator data. The running comparator would flick back and forth between images in the field of view of interest, and kept the original images as the start point while constantly updating the second image with new data. Any planets, then, would show an increasing oscillation as the images flicked between original and new images.
    “One here!” crowed Akira suddenly. “Definitely moving back and forth!”
    “Wonderful, Dad!” Caroline said. “Show me!” She studied it for a moment. “All right, Sakura, I’ll need our full magnification on that location for a minute.”
    “Hold on . . . I’ll rotate us. Okay, there, we’re steady.”
    The built-in telescopic optics in the forward imaging system gave Caroline a high-quality image to look at. “Ohh, how pretty ! ” she said a moment later, and projected the picture onto the forward screen for everyone to see.
    Whips had to admit it was quite pretty, even to his perceptions, which weren’t quite the same as those of his human friends. It was a good thing they had displays which actually emitted the intended wavelengths, instead of that old human red-green-blue system; or he’d only be able to make out shapes in those displays.
    In the projected image floated a slightly flattened sphere, banded with rippled stripes of startlingly bright colors. Based on what he knew of human perceptions, they ranged from bright red through purple and even some definite green, though he’d use different names for the colors back home. “That seems even more spectacular than Jupiter. What is it with all those colors?”
    Caroline shook her head absently. “So many possibilities. Though I looked at the spectrum of the star, and this planet, and I’m pretty sure this system’s got more heavy elements in it than ours. So it might be a higher concentration of complex compounds in the atmosphere.”
    “Well, that’s one gas giant,” Laura said. “We need to find others, presumably closer to the star. Sakura, have we gotten enough parallax to estimate distance?”
    “I think so.” His friend stared vacantly into air for a moment, seeing her own display. “Um, yeah. Looks like we’re just a hair over one point two AUs from the primary, which refines all my other estimates!”
    “Where’s the Goldilocks Zone?” asked Hitomi, startling them.
    “I’ll tell you in a second,” Caroline said, but Melody, who’d been mostly silent, interjected, “Centered at one hundred thirty-seven million kilometers.”
    Caroline looked at Melody. “How—”
    “Well, I’d brought up the data on calculating it earlier, so I just caught Sakura’s data and threw it in.”
    “So what’s the Goldilocks Zone?” asked Hitomi.
    “You remember the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears?” Sakura asked. When Hitomi nodded, Sakura went on, “Well, then, the Goldilocks Zone is the region around the star that’s ‘just right’—not too close and hot, not too far and cold—for planets like Earth.”
    “Oh! That makes sense!”
    “Sakura, my measurements agree with yours,” said Caroline. “If that’s the case, then Whips and Mom have the best views of that region, at least where we currently are. But some of the Zone is going to be out of sight or hard to differentiate behind the primary.”
    “Let’s allow the system to accumulate more movement,” Akira suggested, “and take a break. The bathroom’s fortunately