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Asked by howcroae1 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 16 Mar 2012.
Question: Weren't the two planets stars out last night? Why?
- Keywords:
- night,
- planet,
- star,
- stargazing,
- topical
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Adam Stevens answered on 16 Mar 2012:
You probably mean Venus and Jupiter?
The planets reflect light back to us just like the moon but because they’re further away they look a bit like stars. They can be much brighter though, and move faster. At the moment Venus and jupiter are very close together in the sky.
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Leila Battison answered on 19 Mar 2012:
We can see planets in the sky most nights, but they might be tricky to spot because they’re out on their own, and they might not come up until the very early hours of the morning when all sensible people are in bed.
Last night you could see Venus and Jupiter really close together (Venus was the brightest thing in the sky apart from the moon), and then opposite them in the sky Mars was quite bright and looking really red. Later on in the evening Saturn came up too, but I’d gone to bed by then.
You can see the planets in the sky because like the moon they reflect the suns light, even when we can’t see the sun. The planets orbit the sun just like us, but slowly, so that we see them moving across the sky like the stars. I use a planetarium app for my smart phone to help me spot planets and other things in the sky 🙂
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Nazim Bharmal answered on 20 Mar 2012:
Generally you always have bright, star-like, objects near the horizon at about the time the sun is going down (or coming up): these are the planets and because they are so close, they reflect a lot of light from the sun. But what is unusual recently is that two planets were close together, usually they are a lot further apart.
About 12 years ago, five planets all lined up in a line near sunset! Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn,
Comments
howcroae1 commented on :
Thanks for answering my question