Planets

The word planet, from the Latin planeta, itself taken from the Greek planetes, designates the “wandering stars”, sometimes moving unpredictably in the sky. However, their course around the Sun presents a well-oiled regularity that can be contemplated during sessions in a planetarium, these places of recreational education where sky lovers gather. Blaise Cendrars already described them in Le lotissement du ciel: “… The humming of all these automatic mechanisms [of the stars] regulated like the clockwork of the Jena planetarium, which I had visited in detail”.