Saturn has eight moons. Titan, its largest one, can be seen with a 3" glass. Its celebrated rings are telescopic objects but a small glass reveals them.
The student will hardly mistake Uranus for a fixed star, as it is only under the most favorable circumstances that it can be seen with the naked eye.
At its nearest approach to the earth, it is as bright as a sixth-magnitude star. Uranus is accompanied by four moons, and takes seven years to pass through a constellation of the Zodiac.
Neptune is the most distant of the planets in the solar system, and is never visible to the naked eye.
The earth comes properly under a discussion of the planets, but a description of it is hardly within the scope of this work.
Confusion in identifying the planets is really confined to Mars and Saturn, for Venus and Jupiter are much brighter than any of the fixed stars, and their position in the heavens identifies them, as we have seen before.
The following table of first-magnitude stars in the Zodiacal constellations confines the question of identifying the planets to a comparison of the unknown star with the following-named stars:
Castor and Pollux in Gemini. Spica " Virgo. Regulus " Leo. Aldebaran " Taurus. Antares " Scorpius.
The first four stars named above are white in color, so that either Mars or Saturn is readily distinguished from them.
As for Aldebaran and Antares, which are both red stars, not unlike Mars and Saturn in color and magnitude, the fact that the latter do not twinkle, and that they do not appear in the diagrams, should satisfy the observer of their identity. Reference to an almanac, or a few nights of observation, will in any case set at rest any doubt in the matter.
[Illustration: COMPARATIVE SIZE OF THE PLANETS.]
The Milky Way, or Galaxy as it is sometimes called, is a great band of light that stretches across the heavens. Certain portions of it are worthy of being viewed with an opera-glass, which separates this seemingly confused and hazy stream into numberless points of light, emanating from myriads of suns.
This wonderful feature of the heavens is seen to best advantage during the months of July, August, September, and October. Beginning near the head of Cepheus, about thirty degrees from the North Pole, it passes through Cassiopeia, Perseus, Auriga, part of Orion, and the feet of Gemini, where it crosses the Ecliptic, and thence continues into the southern hemisphere, beyond our ken in these latitudes.