TL;DRAbstract
Before you view a planet you must first find one. For many people this is a non-trivial problem. You can approach it as the ancient people did and watch every night for objects which slowly move amongst the stars. Five planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – were discovered this way. There is another clue and that involves the twinkle of the stars. The stars are so distant that they can be considered, for all practical purposes, point sources of light. As their light comes down through the atmosphere, small variations in density, temperature and upper atmosphere winds act like weak lenses, focusing and defocusing the light from moment to moment. Thus, the brightness of stars appears to change. Their position in the sky will also appear to change rapidly, causing the star to appear as a small fuzzy disk in the telescope. This is the atmospheric seeing limit discussed earlier.
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Before you view a planet you must first find one. For many people this is a non-trivial problem. You can approach it as the ancient people did and watch every night for objects which slowly move amongst the stars. Five planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – were discovered this way. There is another clue and that involves the twinkle of the stars. The stars are so distant that they can be considered, for all practical purposes, point sources of light. As their light comes down through the atmosphere, small variations in density, temperature and upper atmosphere winds act like weak lenses, focusing and defocusing the light from moment to moment. Thus, the brightness of stars appears to change. Their position in the sky will also appear to change rapidly, causing the star to appear as a small fuzzy disk in the telescope. This is the atmospheric seeing limit discussed earlier.
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