The stars move in the sky, but the distance between them are fix. However, some luminious points in the sky move among stars night to an other. They are planets. The origin is from the Grec language that means "wanderer". A telescope can show us that planets have different shapes and sizes. For example, Mercury and Venus go trouht phase cycles and Saturn has lots of rings. Many spacecrafts have visited almost every planet and have given us a lot of information on them.

In order, in our solar system, we have the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Pluto was a planet until august 24 of 2006. She now has a dwarf planet status.

If you want to find them in the sky, usualy, the star glitter. The light that comes from theese small luminous points oustside of the atmosphere are disturbed by the troubled air. This make a variation of their lightning and makes them move above their real position. The planets are small luminous disks, however, we can not detect their dimension with a simple look. The turbulence of the air in the atmosphere has less effect on the lighting of the planets, because their apparent size is higher, this make their lighting more stable then a star.

If you see something lighting stabely and all the others seem to glitter above it, it's probably a planet.

The orbit of Venus is inside the earths orbit, this is why Venus has never been seen this far from the Sun. When Venus is visible, it's the most luminous thing in the sky, after the Sun and the Moon. If you see something very lumious with a stable lighting in the eastern sky before sun rise, it's probably Venus.

Jupiter is also very luminous and can be observed at midnight. If you see something with a stable lighting in the middle south sky, far away where the Sun is rising or the setting, it's probably Jupiter.

Mars is never as luminous as Jupiter or Venus and Saturn is never as luminous as Jupiter. Mars has a red tint that we can see with our eyes. Saturn has a small yellow tint. We need binoculars to observe Uranus and Neptune, and a telescope to see Pluto.

The Earth and the other planets go around the Sun almost in the same frame. It's why the Sun and the planets seem to move in the same direction in the sky. This movement is call ecliptic. The higher the orbit the more time is required to make it.

The apparent position of the planets change week after week and almost never repeat themselves. If a planet is visible, maybe you can see it again if you can observe a stable luminous object in the ecliptic.

Night after night, planets move westward if you compare them to the sky. Sometimes, a planet seems to change the direction of this rotation some week. This happens when the Earth is closer to the planet, like a car seems to go backwards when you pass it. The car is not going backwards, but you are going faster than it.