I’ve read that it means it appears to be going backwards but does it?
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Key idea here: on any given night, if you watch a planet, it will rise in the east and set in the west, appearing to be motionless relative to the stars around it. It will never appear to rise in the west and set in the east.
If you compare the planet’s location relative to the stars and come out night after night, you will typically see that each night, its position has moved a little bit to the east. This is how we noticed the planets were different from the stars.
When a planet is in retrograde, if you come out each night, you will notice that each night it’s a little farther to the west instead of east. The slow night-to-night changes are backward compared to the usual motion.
Again, though, the motion you see during the course of a single night will always be east-to-west, moving right along with the stars around it.
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