Why does the naked-eye planets appear to move with stars but change their positions in complicated patterns?
It has everything to do with where we are viewing them from. If we were on the sun, the positions of the planets would change very simply, as they orbit around us. But because we Earthlings are orbiting around the sun too, we see these simple orbits as a complicated combination of our orbit and theirs. The stars “move” because the earth is rotating, once a day. The naked-eye planets seem to move with the stars, because the earth’s rotation is so much faster than the change of the planets’ position in the sky.
