Very easy, even without knowing the sky map. The planets are shining calm light, the stars are incessantly flicker , as if flashing, trembling, changing brightness, and bright stars not high above the horizon are still incessantly shimmering in different colors. “This light,” says Flammarion, “is now bright, now weak, intermittent, now white, now green, now red, sparkling like a transparent diamond, enlivens the starry deserts, prompting to see in the stars like eyes looking at the Earth.” The stars twinkle especially strongly and colorfully on frosty nights and in windy weather, as well as after rain, when the sky quickly cleared of clouds. Stars above the horizon twinkle more conspicuously than those burning high in the sky; white stars are stronger than yellowish and reddish ones.

Like radiance, twinkling is not a property inherent in the stars themselves; it is imparted to them by the earth's atmosphere, through which the rays of the stars must pass before reaching the eye. Rising above the restless shell of gas through which we view the universe, we would not notice the twinkling of the stars: they shine there with a calm, constant light.

The reason for the flickering is the same that causes distant objects to tremble when the soil is strongly heated by the Sun on hot days.

Starlight then has to penetrate not a homogeneous medium, but gaseous layers. different temperature, different density, and hence different refraction. In such an atmosphere, numerous optical prisms, convex and concave lenses, constantly changing their location, seem to be scattered. Rays of light undergo numerous deviations from the direct path in them, sometimes concentrating, sometimes scattering. Hence - frequent changes in the brightness of the star. And since refraction is accompanied by color scattering, along with brightness fluctuations, changes are also observed. coloring .

“There are,” wrote the famous Soviet astronomer G.A. Tikhov, who studied the phenomenon of twinkling, - ways to count the number of color changes of a twinkling star in certain time. It turns out that these changes occur extremely rapidly, and their number varies in different cases from a few dozen to a hundred or more per second. You can verify this by following in a simple way. Take binoculars and look at bright star, bringing the objective end of the binoculars into a fast circular rotation. Then, instead of a star, you will see a ring consisting of many individual multi-colored stars. With a slower flicker or with a very fast movement of the binoculars, this ring breaks up instead of stars into multi-colored arcs of large and small lengths.

It remains to explain why the planets, unlike stars, do not twinkle, but shine evenly, calmly. The planets are much closer to us than the stars; therefore they appear to the eye not as a point, but as luminous circle , disk, although of such small angular dimensions that, due to their blinding brightness, these angular dimensions are almost imperceptible.

Each individual point of such a circle flickers, but the changes in brightness and color of individual points occur independently of one another, in various moments of time, and therefore complement each other; the decrease in brightness of one point coincides with the increase in brightness of another, so that total strength the planet's light remains unchanged. Hence - the calm, non-flickering brilliance of the planets.

This means that the planets appear to us as non-flickering because they flicker at many points, but at different points in time.

Twinkling stars.
The stars themselves do not twinkle. This impression is created by an observer on earth when he perceives the light of a star after it has passed through the atmosphere. This is an indispensable condition for flickering. Attention! Only if you observe even a very distant star from space, it will not flicker.

Show in full. Astronauts observing the stars from the moon, where there is no atmosphere, saw a sky dotted with stars that shone with a steady, unblinking light. But here, on the earth, covered with a thick "Blanket" of the atmosphere, the rays of starlight, before reaching the surface, are repeatedly refracted in different directions.
The light of a star becomes flickering as it passes from a layer of the atmosphere with a high density to a layer with a lower density. Why? The masses of air around us do not stand still. They are constantly moving relative to each other. Warm air goes up, cold air goes down. Air refracts light differently depending on temperature. When light passes from a layer of air of lower density to a layer of higher density, the flickering of light begins. At the same time, the outlines of the stars become blurry, their images increase. The intensity of the radiation of stars, that is, their brightness, changes. Either the star is visible very well, or it has dimmed. And here again it is very clearly visible. These changes in light intensity are scientifically called "Scintillation". But we'll call it "Flicker".

Not all stars twinkle.
Planets, for example, glow by reflected sunlight and do not flicker. Venus and Mars look like big bright stars in the sky, but differ from them in that they do not twinkle. Why? The planets are closer to the earth and we perceive them as small disks rather than tiny dots. Light from different parts of the discs is reflected. Although it is refracted in exactly the same way, it is refracted differently. Bright light is reflected from some parts of the disk, and dimmer light is reflected from others. In a second, they change places. The average radiation intensity from the entire surface of the disk remains constant. Therefore, the disk of the planet glows with a steady unblinking light.
A planet can be distinguished from a star by the nature of the radiation: the stars twinkle, but the planet does not.
Indeed, this is not bad way distinguish a planet from a star. But if there are large excitations in the earth's atmosphere, for example, a hurricane, then the planets can also begin to twinkle. Our sun is also a star. But it is much closer to the earth than the stars we see at night. The sun is not a point in the sky. We perceive the sun as a large uniformly shining disk. Only if the sun moved away from the earth for trillions of kilometers, it would be lost among many other stars and would twinkle just like them. The twinkling of a star is very beautiful and can inspire a poet. But for an astronomer, this is truly a "Headache". Even if the sky is very clear, there are large movements of air masses in the atmosphere, the so-called perturbations, which make it very difficult to observe and photograph stars.
best time for astronomical observations- clear nights and calm atmosphere without disturbances. When the atmosphere above the telescope is calm, astronomers observe with good visibility and almost no flicker. With the development of the space age, powerful telescopes were launched into orbit, in which scientists observe the true picture of cosmic silence, examine the stars shining with calm eternal light.

Distinguish with a simple eye fixed star from a "wandering", i.e., planet, very easily, even without knowing the sky map. The planets are shining calm

light, the stars are incessantly flicker

As if flashing, trembling, changing brightness, and bright stars not high above the horizon are still constantly shimmering in different colors. “This light,” says Flammarion, “is now bright, now weak, intermittent, now white, now green, now red, sparkling like a transparent diamond, enlivens the starry deserts, prompting to see in the stars like eyes looking at the Earth.” The stars twinkle especially strongly and colorfully on frosty nights and in windy weather, as well as after rain, when the sky quickly cleared of clouds. Stars above the horizon twinkle more conspicuously than those burning high in the sky; white stars are stronger than yellowish and reddish ones.

Like radiance, twinkling is not a property inherent in the stars themselves; it is imparted to them by the earth's atmosphere, through which the rays of the stars must pass before reaching the eye. Rising above the restless shell of gas through which we view the universe, we would not notice the twinkling of the stars: they shine there with a calm, constant light.

The reason for the flickering is the same that causes distant objects to tremble when the soil is strongly heated by the Sun on hot days.

Starlight then has to penetrate not a homogeneous medium, but gas layers of different temperatures, different densities, and hence different refraction. In such an atmosphere, numerous optical prisms, convex and concave lenses, constantly changing their location, seem to be scattered. Rays of light undergo numerous deviations from the direct path in them, sometimes concentrating, sometimes scattering. Hence - frequent changes in the brightness of the star. And since refraction is accompanied by color scattering, along with brightness fluctuations, changes are also observed. coloring .

“There are,” wrote the famous Soviet astronomer G.A. Tikhov, who studied the phenomenon of twinkling, - ways to count the number of color changes of a twinkling star at a certain time. It turns out that these changes occur extremely rapidly, and their number varies in different cases from a few dozen to a hundred or more per second. You can verify this in the following simple way. Take binoculars and look through them at a bright star, bringing the objective end of the binoculars into a rapid circular rotation. Then, instead of a star, you will see a ring consisting of many individual multi-colored stars. With a slower flicker or with a very fast movement of the binoculars, this ring breaks up instead of stars into multi-colored arcs of large and small lengths.

It remains to explain why the planets, unlike stars, do not twinkle, but shine evenly, calmly. The planets are much closer to us than the stars; therefore they appear to the eye not as a point, but as luminous circle

A disk, although of such small angular dimensions that, due to their blinding brightness, these angular dimensions are almost imperceptible.

Each individual point of such a circle flickers, but the changes in brightness and color of individual points occur independently of one another, in various

moments of time, and therefore complement each other; the decrease in the brightness of one point coincides with the increase in the brightness of another, so that the total luminous intensity of the planet remains unchanged. Hence - the calm, non-flickering brilliance of the planets.

This means that the planets appear to us as non-flickering because they flicker at many points, but at different points in time.

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ABOUT MYSTERIES, SECRETS AND THE MAGIC PORTAL
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