DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A PLANET AND A STAR.
"How could he tell the difference?" asked Harry. "When I looked at Planet Jupiter last night it looked like the stars, only rounder and bigger."
"The planets are so much nearer to us than the stars that we can follow them as they slowly creep between us and the stars in their journey around the sun. The stars are so far away that we would have to watch them for thousands of years before they would seem to move at all, yet we know they are moving."
"Are the stars moving?" said Harry, in surprise.
"Yes, they are moving, just as distant steamers seen at sea are moving; but they are so far away that they seem motionless. Don't you remember how we used to watch them from the seashore. Still they were going as fast as steam could take them. We might compare the steamers to the stars, and the little boats nearer shore were more like the planets. We could easily follow the boats with our eyes as they danced over the waves, and in the same way we can easily follow the planets as they creep across the sky, because they are so much nearer to us than the stars."
"The new planet was called Uranus, although at first the friends of Herschel wanted to name it after him. Next to Uranus comes the planet Neptune, which was discovered before it was ever seen."