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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The night sky was very dark, except for the stars and planets, so on clear nights they’d spend a lot of time looking at the patters of stars in the sky.
They played connect-the-dots to find shapes that they could easily recognize: constellations. That made it easy to follow where the stars were in the sky and even give names to some of them.
They noticed that constellations moved up and down in the sky with the seasons, but the positions of the stars in a constellation, and constellations relative to one another, stayed the same. Except…
There were a small number of bright stars in the sky whose positions moved about — in one constellation one day, then moving to another in a few days or weeks. They weren’t part of constellations, but “wanderers” (or in Greek, “planētēs”). They didn’t know what stars or planets were other than lights in the heavens, but “planets” were wandering lights in the heavens.
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