The Midair Garden: A park-like place below the castle and above the residential area. You can see the windows in the background "sky."
This article contains background information for those who already watched a few episodes of this anime. For readers who are new to Fushigiboshi no Futagohime, it contains spoilers.
Did you notice that the sky you see in the Sunny Kingdom is not a real one?
Their sky looks very real and almost seamless, but you might have noticed these strange things in the sky:
The Midair Garden: A park-like place below the castle and above the residential area. You can see the windows in the background "sky."
The meaning of this becomes clear if you think about the structure of the Sunny Kingdom. Let's look at it from the outside. The Sunny Kingdom is a floating ball at the center of the Mysterious Star, and the town, called Ohisama no Machi (Sunny Town), is located in this sphere—more precisely, in the upper part of the kingdom. When you see the beautiful sky of Sunny Town, you are actually seeing the internal surface of this red dome. A part of the castle is outside the dome, while the rest of the castle, including the twins' room, is inside.
The Sunny Kingdom viewed from the outside
The virtual sky is not really seamless.
The windows are open. Lione comes in through one of them.
The Mysterious Star is said to be 1,000–2,000 km in diameter [Character Detail Book, p.73] (roughly one fifth of that of Earth), which makes the "altitude" of the Sunny Kingdom 500–1,000 km (1,600,000–3,300,000 feet), that is hundred times higher than the highest mountain on Earth (8848 m; 29028 feet). It's almost like a space station in orbit. It's not surprising that the inhabited area is in the dome, which makes it easy for them to maintain their environment, including things like air pressure, temperature, water. But more importantly, the virtual sky gives them days and nights.
Can't the dome be transparent, allowing them to catch natural light instead of the artificial light from the virtual sky? The problem is that not much light would make it into the dome. The Blessing of the Sun, which works as a sun for the other kingdoms, is always below your feet as long as you stay in Sunny Town and never rises in the sky.
Sunny Town is, by definition, always in the midnight area inside the Mysterious Star. As you can see, the outside of the dome is dark once the light (emblem) on top of the castle is turned off, signifying that it's night time for the Sunny Kingdom.
At "night" (i.e. when the light is off)
The light (emblem) on the top of the castle.
They need a proper lighting system for the whole town. If a transparent dome doesn't help, three-dimensional sky image projected on, or emitted from, the internal surface of the dome is a nice solution. It's virtual, but their technology seems to be advanced enough to make the scenery natural-looking and comfortable. With that, the townspeople can enjoy bright days and dark nights.
The energy source is probably the Blessing of the Sun itself. Although the sky in the dome is artificial, the daylight is "real" (essentially the same sunlight as the other kingdoms receive).
Since the sky is virtual and everything is in a relatively small dome, they probably don't have real weather either. Rain and snow, if any, are artificial (to provide water) or virtual images (some kind of eye candy). This also explains why Fine didn't understand the people of the Seed Kingdom, who desperately wanted it to rain. In the home country of Fine and Rein, people don't need to "wish" for it to rain. If and when they need rain, Omendo can just hit one of the buttons in his lab. Or maybe they have more efficient ways to distribute water than artificial rain, which makes rain totally useless to them (if so, then what Fine said in the Seed Kingdom was understandable).
Sunny Town and its artificial sky: the yellow line is where the 6 elevators go up and down.
Said differently, they don't have much natural water up there. They might have technology to get water from the atmosphere, or they might regularly import water from the Waterdrop Kingdom. Perhaps they know how to recycle water in their city, where they don't have abundant water resources. Anyway, rain is not the source of their water supply, and so they don't appreciate it very much.
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