Why stars twinkle and planets do not?
The ‘twinkle effect’ is entirely due to density fluctuations in our atmosphere. It affects stars and planets equally but is less noticeable with brighter objects like Venus. To get around this problem some astronomical telescopes have lasers that can ‘read’ the fluctuations and deformable main mirrors that can compensate for any distortion. Then there is, of course, the Hubble Space Telescope that was designed to eliminate this problem altogether.
