Eli5: Why do planets look like stars?
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Planets can look a bit like stars because stars just look like points of light too small to have any perceptual shape.
Due to geometry as things become more distant the amount of your visual field they cover reduces. Take a triangle and a circle, and if they are far enough away they will both just look like a dot.
A very distant star produces its own light while a planet reflects the light of our sun. It turns out that most planets we can see with the naked eye seem brighter than most stars, but that are all in that “pretty dim point of light” zone so they can be difficult to distinguish by the novice.
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