Welcome to Gaia! ::

yay help thread! I was thinking of starting one, but I kept forgetting. sweatdrop I'm glad you got one up though.

So, I'll answer your second question first, which is yes Venus does follow a similar patters to Mercury. I'll expain the why for both of them right now.

Mercury doesn't rise very high in the sky because since mercury is the closest planet to the sun, and is inside our orbit, we always see it close to the sun. So, when the sun sets, since Mercury is always close to the sun as seen by us, it also sets just after the sun sets. That means it can't get very high in the sky. (in reality you could probably see mercury high in the sky during the day, near the sun, but we can't because of all the light from the sun at the time.) This also answers why you can only really see Mercury just after sunset and just before sunrise.
As for Venus, it is a bit farther from the sun, so it can go farther out as seen by us. So though Venus does go much higher in the sky then Mercury does (as seen on the surface) Venus can't go very far from the sun either and so follows a very similar path to what Mercury does.

so... does that expain it for you? if it doesn't I can try again. blaugh

you're welcome ^_^

... well I dunno if we could see Mercury even if you had special filters. I haven't heard of anything like that.

possibly that could work. BUt then like I said I've never really heard anything like that about people looking at Mercury that way, so I'm not sure if that would work...

all of the planets exhibit retrograde motion at certain points in there orbits as viewed from the earth, since we are also orbiting (linkage)
but none of them orbit retrograde, though venus does rotate slowly retrograde
the same can not be said of moons however, since jupiter (saturn and uranus too, just not so many) has a number of eccentric outers that orbit retrograde, but thats because theyre all captured asteroids...
hope this asnwered your questions 3nodding

well, in Copernican times they only knew about the planets out to saturn. the outer moons and asteroids where a complete unknown to them (with a few weird exceptions, but thats another topic for another day) but they saw basicly the same things we see now, and that is the planets going prograde most of them time, with occaisonal periods of apparant retrograde motion, which is of course an optical illiusion
though, they thought that the planets really did occasionaly switch directions until Copernicus' times, though Hipparchus and Ptolemy (and a few others, but thats another topic again) seem to have been aware of this illusion as well
again, the link I sent you earlier spells this all out in nore detail, though my description could be called the executive summary razz
no problem though, feel free to ask any more questions you have 3nodding

you are taking the classes on this after all 3nodding
I hadnt thought much about whether mercury or venus would exhibit apparant retrograde motion, I just assumed because I remember hearing that that particular illusion is what tipped off those who paid attention to such things that our system was indeed heliocentric. I guess this is because I dont really track the paths of the planets in the sky myself, but rather use software to tell me where to look when I care to sweatdrop
sometimes it is a little tricky to think the way our ancestors did, since we know so much more and take it for granted, at least certain things anyways xd
I didnt mean to accidentily mislead you with my assumption jacko11111, sumimasen sweatdrop
Im usually really good about those kinds of things too xd

I use Celestia and a linux program called kStars, both very handy pieces of software, but for different things. Celestia is a great way of seeing how things are really situated in relation to each other, while kStars is a traditional star chart program. Both are very useful, though celestia is only really useful after youve expanded its object database a bit.