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Category Archives: The Solar System

According to official IAU figures, our Solar System contains one star, eight planets, over a hundred moons, a number of dwarf planets, countless asteroids and comets, and several tens of unmanned spacecraft.  If you want to know more about planets or other members of the Solar System, browse the articles listed below!

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The Five Planets

Urban Astronomer avatarPosted on 12 Oct, 2011 by Allen Versfeld

  The ancients had beautifully dark skies, dusted with thousands of stars of varying brightness. At some point, they noticed that five of these stars were quite different from the rest.  Not only were they conspicuously bright, but they also moved against the background of the sky, while all the rest were fixed in place.  These movements weren’t all at the same speed, and varied over time, so these special stars became known as “Planets“, from the greek word for … Continue reading →

Posted in Astronomy, Astronomy 101, The Solar System | Leave a reply

Comets

Urban Astronomer avatarPosted on 16 Sep, 2011 by Allen Versfeld8 Jul, 2016

Comets have always been special.  In ancient times, the sky was a stately ordered place, with the Sun, Moon, Stars and Planets all moving in their stately and predictable paths.  But every now and then, something strange and new would appear.  It would start as a fuzzy star with a misty trail behind it, growing from week to week until it formed a spectacular arc across the sky before fading away and vanishing.  This was not a part of the … Continue reading →

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Venus

Urban Astronomer avatarPosted on 15 Sep, 2011 by Allen Versfeld

As one of the classical planets, Venus has been a familiar sight to humanity ever since we first started looking at the stars. Like Mercury, Venus’s movements are bound to the Sun but the similarities end there. Venus moves more slowly, and wanders further. It also shines extremely brightly – only the Sun and the Moon are brighter than Venus. Venus is easily identified as the Evening or Morning star and often passes near to the Moon, putting on a … Continue reading →

Posted in Astronomy, Astronomy 101, The Solar System | 1 Reply

Uranus

Urban Astronomer avatarPosted on 15 Sep, 2011 by Allen Versfeld

Uranus is the seventh planet out from the Sun, and the first to discovered in recorded history.  Although it is technically visible to the naked eye, it shines faintly enough that it appears to be just another tiny dot in an ocean of stars.  It is so inconspicuous that even though it appears in some of Galileo’s sketches of Jupiter as a tiny star in the background, he never noticed it moving between viewing sessions.  It wasn’t until 1781 that … Continue reading →

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Neptune

Urban Astronomer avatarPosted on 15 Sep, 2011 by Allen Versfeld

  Neptune is the only planet that cannot be seen with the naked eye (assuming you aren’t still resisting the formal IAU definition of a planet…).  It is extremely far away and very dim, so much so that it wasn’t even discovered visually – its existence had to be inferred mathematically. Herschell may have turned the scientific world on its head by discovering a sixth planet in the sky (We don’t count earth since it is under our feet and is technically the … Continue reading →

Posted in Astronomy, Astronomy 101, The Solar System | Leave a reply

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