• carpoftruth [any, any]@hexbear.netM
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    3 days ago

    there’s definitely a lot of people out there who don’t know what planets look like in the night sky

    protip: planets twinkle and look like distorted little discs when viewed through a telescope or binos. stars only ever look like points of light, they are too far away to twinkle (though when thin clouds pass in front of them they sorta change)

    • NephewAlphaBravo [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      I thought stars twinkle because they’re just points, so distortions are enough to move the entire image. Planets are large enough that distortions don’t really change the shape or size of the image, they just make it blurry.

      • carpoftruth [any, any]@hexbear.netM
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        3 days ago

        Yeah fair enough - both things are subject to atmospheric distortion changing the way they look. I am thinking in the context of ufo-ology though - planets are large enough that distortions in the atmosphere between the viewer and the planet can make the planet look like it’s doing stuff - different shadows and warbles on the disc of the planet can look like shit changing form. a star will shift with atmospheric distortion but because it’s only a single point of light instead of a disc, it’ll appear to move a little in position but there isn’t the same intra-object change.

    • freagle@lemmygrad.ml
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      3 days ago

      No, the common wisdom is definitely that stars twinkle and planets do not.

      Even more so, some of the recent videos of Sirius show wild fluctuations in color because stars are active plasma with light passing through many interstellar structures while planets are far more stable, they are reflective only, and there’s very little between us and them.