If I look into the sky and I see two yellow dots it’s all stars for me. Then I hear one of them is mars and I’m like „ok, still looks the same“. How did the people hundred of years ago discover what’s a close planet and what’s a far away star?
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People like exploring things. I don’t know all the history but let’s skip to the part where someone has a telescope for looking out into the coast waters and spotting possible enemy ships or trade ships. One day the moon is big and bright and that person goes “Well fuck let me look at this mf with this thing he’ll yeah brother” and even with a very weak telescope you can see tons of detail in the moon. Try it if you haven’t.
So at the same time people were also just looking at the stars and noticing that some of them were always in the same spot, some were just very so slightly moved a little bit, and other ones were moving a great deal just over the course of one night or a few days or a week. Some of them weren’t even visible anymore. Because of the Earth’s rotation or something fancy like that.
So now these people take their telescopes and keep looking up and they record what they see, these dots and patterns and how they move.
Then one nice clear night someone looks up and sees not a white dot but a ball. A ball with colors and…clouds? Rings? Surface features? What the fuck are these things? Planets. Fucking planets.
It’s also important to remember that back when these things were first being discovered, light polution was basically non-existent. You could see the bright bands of billions of stars of the Milky Way with your naked eyes. Today you have be in the absolute darkest parts of the world and as elevated as you can possibly be to see these things.
There was zero chance people didn’t notice these things in detail with their naked eyes, which is what prompted them to look closer using the tools that they developed for other things (telescopes).
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