Look Up to the New Moon Night Sky to see the Old Wanderers

By John Gallup

TNews Contrbutor

Ancient civilizations spent a lot of their evenings looking up and telling stories about what they observed. 

 They noticed that almost all the bright things they saw in the night sky moved very slowly westward with each passing night and returned to the same place in the heavens at about the same season of every year. 

 However, five of the brightest objects didn’t follow this pattern. They behaved oddly, wandering back and forth against the slow-moving background. 

The ancient Greeks called them “planets,” which is Greek for “wanderers.” They seemed to confine their wandering to a narrow strip in the sky, the same stripe that the Moon and Sun moved through. 

 Three of them moved east across the night sky against the background, but all three stopped moving east and moved back to the west for a period of time, stopped again, then resumed their easterly course. 

The other two were stranger yet. They would bob up in the morning or evening sky, rise to a point, then fall back down to disappear from where they rose, only to reappear in the morning sky, rise to about the same angle from the horizon, then turn around and head back down. 

The strange movements of these objects became the subject of speculation and ultimately folklore of every ancient civilization.  

To this day four of those five planets attract our interest and can be easily observed with a telescope or even a good set of binoculars.

The 5th, which never gets more than a short distance above the horizon, speedily turns around and heads back down. It is still easy to observe for those with a flat horizon, but that’s not us. 

For the ancients, naming them was easy. The brightest one never crossed the top of the sky, but made the morning and evening skies jaw-droppingly beautiful. What was the ideal of beauty to them but their goddess of love, Venus? The one that never got very high but raced up and down in the morning and evening sky was named after speedy Mercury. 

Of the remaining three, one was obviously a dark reddish brown, reminding them of the blood spilled by the god of war, Mars. The other two moved much more slowly along the planetary path. 

The brighter of the two took 12 years to return to the same position, and the dimmer one, which then and today seems yellowish, took nearly 30 years, longer than many people lived.  

The brighter one was named Jupiter, and the dimmer yellow one, because it moved so slowly, was named after his elderly dad, Saturn. 

We have been able to observe Saturn, Mars, and Jupiter for most of the winter, and brilliant Venus has recently gotten high enough in the evening sky to peek into Girdwood! 

More on the Sun, Moon, and stars next time!  

For those who don’t want to wait for me to find the time, there are many free or cheap apps for smart phones which can tell you what “that thing up there” is.