Fixed stars
If you go on your housetop or any other convenient elevation on a clear night, you will see a great many stars adorning the vaulted arch of heaven, and if you look more closely you will observe that they all twinkle - that is to say, with the exception of perhaps one or two which shine with a perfectly steady light. The twinklers are suns of other solar systems so far away that a traveler going with the speed of light would require hundreds of years to reach some of them. They move in such enormous circles and are at such a distance that they appear to maintain the same positions relative to one another. Therefore they are called "fixed stars."
There is a radical difference between the twinklers and the stars which emit a steady light. If you watch one of the latter night after night, you will find that it changes position relative to the fixed stars in a direction from west to east, the same as the Sun. Continued observation of the various heavenly bodies whose light is steady will show that they all follow the same path among the maze of fixed stars. Four such luminous planets are visible to the naked eye at various times of the year. Their names are Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and Venus. A fifth, Mercury, is usually so close to the Sun that it is invisible on account of the luminosity of the Sun's rays, but at times it may be seen in the west shortly after sunset or in the east just before sunrise. It twinkles like a fixed star, although it is a planet. There is a spiritual reason for the anomaly, but as that feature would divert our attention, we will pass it by at present.
A telescope is required to properly observe the three planets nearest the outskirts of our solar system, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. These eight heavenly bodies move around the Sun. So does the Earth; and the Moon revolves about the Earth; but when we look into space it appears as if the Earth stands still, and Sun, Moon, and planets all move around us. The ancient Ptolemaic system of astronomy in vogue until modern times was based upon this conception of the universe, and subscribed to by all until superseded by the Copernican theory. Skeptics and scoffers who have never taken time nor trouble to investigate, arrogantly maintain that since the Copernican theory has proved that the planets, including the Earth, move around the Sun, that fact in itself is prima facie evidence of the fallacy of astrology, which they term as "exploded superstition."
