If you watch the moon, you’d notice that it rises in the east and sets in the west. This direction is called ‘prograde motion’. The stars, sun, and moon all follow the same prograde motion, meaning that they all move across the sky in the same direction.
However, at certain times of the orbit, certain planets move in ‘retrograde motion’, the opposite way. Mars, Venus, and Mercury all have retrograde motion that have been recorded for as long as we’ve had something to write with. While most of the time, they spend their time in the ‘prograde’ direction, you’ll find that sometimes they stop, go backwards, stop, then go forward again, all over the course of several days to weeks.
Here are videos I created that show you what this would look like if you tracked their position in the sky each night for an year or two.
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