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Planets and Bright Stars

|< < Prev #3219 (March 13, 2026)

Title text: An old astronomer trick for distinguishing the Sun from other stars is to take multiple photos a few minutes apart and overlay them, making the Sun stand out due to its high proper motion.

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Explanation

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This comic features a chart of a handful of cosmic objects and what they look like in the night sky. The joke is that they are all nearly identical dots, making the chart almost useless.

The comic shows an identification chart for some of the planet and bright stars visible at night from Earth. Bright shiny objects are often confused by people without astronomical experience, and the chart is supposed to make this easier by placing them adjacent to one another to easily see the differences. The joke is that the pictures look almost identical to one another, and therefore the chart isn't helpful at all.

The real way of distinguishing these objects is by their location on the sky. The stars will be possible to find by the use of constellations, which are apparent pattern of bright stars that make different regions of the sky distinguishable from one another. The planets can be distinguished by not belonging to the constellations, and further differentiated by their color, brightness, and movement relative to the stars (on the scale of weeks or months).

Selected objects do indeed look similar to one another in reality, but not identical. Some of them (in particular, the star Betelgeuse and the planet Mars) have a distinct reddish color, which can be seen in good conditions. The brightness is also different, and it can serve as a guide, but it's difficult to precisely judge brightness by eye, and the planets don't have a constant brightness over time. The differences are actually visible in the comic to a degree, but they're subtle enough to not recognize at the first glance.

Using even a small telescope would make it easy to distinguish the planets by their brightness, size, and surface features. Additionally, using a spectroscope would allow for a measurement of the star's spectrum, which coupled with its brightness would allow an astronomer to easily distinguish between mentioned stars.

The title text suggests a "trick" for recognizing the Sun among other stars. It suggests measuring its fast movement on the sky by overlaying several images. This does indeed differentiate it from other stars, but there are much easier methods, such as its extreme brightness and large angular size. Additionally, "proper motion" is a term usually not used for the Sun.

Transcript

This is one of 46 incomplete transcripts: Don't remove this notice too soon. If you can fix this issue, edit the page!

[Caption: Planets and bright stars identification chart:]

[A 4x3 grid of planets and stars are displayed on a black background. White text below dots of light caption which object it is. Planets and stars are represented by almost-identical dots of white light.]

Venus

Mars

Jupiter

Saturn

Mercury

Sirius

Procyon

Antares

Altair

Betelgeuse

Vega

Polaris

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Discussion

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This is a test. PoolloverNathan^{[stalk the blue seas]} 20:48, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

This is not. —While False (museum | talk | contributions | logs | rights | printable version | page information | what links there | related changes | Google search | current time: 20:13) 18:38, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

A foreign student asked me to help fight against his math teacher. That was unusual. He was in that class for just a couple of weeks. The teacher's phone number was sent to me. The student asked me to spam-call the teacher. 172.71.155.55 22:58, 18 September 2023 (UTC)

here i'm just messing around in html, ignore this

^furhhfghure _{guyrburgryhuyvfr} "rvhru"

interesting way of writing quotations xd

hmmm this one of putting "<p>" in a line break will come in handy for when i want it to start at the same place than the first line

Please beware that <p> on mediawiki also disables automatic paragraph breaks, so you need a closing </p> or you'll break automatic paragraph formatting for the rest of the page. Zmatt (talk) 22:06, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

edit: da hek did that "</div>" come from An user who has no account yet (talk) 14:14, 13 October 2023 (UTC)

hi uh its hard to get here. is this a reference to undocumented feature??? hmm... this is interesting.
108.162.241.216 02:05, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

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yum yum [citation needed]

Hiuiedeixgeyceiyedhcdiedcve {{trout}}

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<a href=" [AT THE JULY 28TH MEETING][tab] "Cancel the meeting! Our cover is blown."> More testing: hello ​ does​this​work (yes​it​does) This isn't a good name (talk) 22:44, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

‮hi 164.58.172.158 14:21, 23 February 2026 (UTC)

What is this?????????????????????? King Pando (talk) 04:25, 10 March 2026 (UTC)‭
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12 March 2026

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