In my mind the extra moon was following the exact same orbital path as the real one, only at a different speed. So it clearly could not be in the same physical reality. What would make it even more interesting is the risk it might have of ever fully manifesting and causing a collision. In that case though we'd have to make pretty clear what exactly causes the fluctuation in the moons reality.

Or maybe, one moon could be here the other in another dimension and they both fluctuate between the two dimensions but one is more here and belongs here and the other belongs there.

On the star. I was sort of imagining it like visible disc in the night sky but not much brighter then stars in general. Just more surface area. But if we have i throwing off particle clouds it could obscure a much brighter entity. If the star is as bright as a full moon at night then its obviously going to wash out a lot of other stars, making the study of stars either astronomy or astrology more difficult. Reading the wikipedia, what if the white dwarf was old enough that it wasn't too far from becoming a black dwarf. Or maybe I'm just obsessed with Jack Vance. I guess not every star has to be dying to be interesting.

Or we could go for a brown dwarf as well but I was wondering if those might be too bright for our purposes. Another possibility is that our planet is orbiting a star that is itself orbiting a different star. As opposed to know where the other star is orbiting ours. Is that possible? Is there any point?