Which degree/degrees will Mars appear stationary this autumn in constellation Leo?
Congratulations, you just found the Ptolemaic universe! All the outer planets (from earth’s point of view) appear to stop, then go backwards for a period of time. This was a major problem with the early astronomers who tried to explain how this worked. Their answer was epicycles, which meant that the outer planets orbited in circles around their primary orbits. Of course, this placed the earth at the center of the action. Wasn’t until folks like Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo to figure out that the sun is the center and the planets orbit around the sun. Still took a little longer for us to get over that we’re not the center of the universe.
