why do stars appear to move in the sky?
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If you are talking about shooting stars, they are obviously moving because they are buring out, and they go out with a bang!\n\nStars always seem to twinkle because their force is always moving, the gas makeup seems brighter and darker at times.\n\nOtherwise, the earth is always moving, thats why they seem to never stand still. ( try looking at a planet in a high powered telescope, you only have it in focus for a few moments, then you have to readjust to keep looking at it because of the earths rotation.)
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They are falling down into the sun. It is their foward motion that prevents them from plunging into the sun and getting vaporized.\n\nIf you go out at night and look at a planet, you will see that it rises in the east and sets in the west, just like everything else in the day or night sky, as a result of the earth's rotation on its axis. From one night to the next, you will see the planets (usually) appear to travel eastward against the background of stars, as a result of their revolution about the sun.
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You can see many of them with the naked eye, and some of the get pretty darn bright.  You can even see the inetrantional space station when it passes overhead.  Of course any of these objects will jusst look like a star moving across the sky at a decent rate.  But it is pretty cool.\n\nhttp://www.heavens-above.com will tell you exactly what is visible from your location on any night, as well as where to look.  You'll need a little bit of amature astronomy knowledge (magnitudes, reading a starchart) to get much out of it, but it is an awsome resource for this kind of thing.
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Planets do not twinkle the way stars do. In fact, this is a good way of figuring out if a particular object you see in the sky is a planet or a star. The reason is that stars are so far away that they are essentially points of light on the sky, while planets actually have finite size. The size of a planet on the sky in a sense "averages out" the turbulent effects of the atmosphere, presenting a relatively stable image to the eye.
1103836
The sun isn't moving.\nThe sun appears to move east to west because Earth is rotating on its axis (actually, the earth is rotating on its axis, as well as rotating around the sun)
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Maybe a geosynchronously orbiting satellite. Those are satellites that rotate with the Earth so it appears that they don't move from our perspective.\n\nObviously, anything else (including stars) would move as the night progressed.\n\nHope that helps.
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The light during the day comes from our star, the sun. The sunlight has to travel through air to get to us. The sunlight looks white, but it has many colors in it (for example, a prism or a rainbow breaks the sunlight into its colors so we can see them). \n\nSome of the blue part of the sunlight cannot go through the air without getting bounced around first by the air, and so it makes it look like the blue is coming from the air in the sky instead of the sun. That is why the sky looks blue.
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Mainly because the sun is so much closer than any other star. The twinkling effects our atmosphere causes on other stars is simply overcome by the brute force of sunlight.\n\nDistant stars twinkle due to Earth's atmosphere, but then why don't planets also twinkle; they look to be about the same size? Here's a good explanation I cut-and-pasted for you from an astronomy website --\n\n"Just like a computer screen, your eye is composed of a certain number of 'pixels,' each represented by a single light-receptor cell in your retina. If two (or more) points of light are close enough such that they are focused on the same receptor cell in your eye, you will experience them as a single point of light. This is the 'resolution' of your eye. \n\nNow, a star on the sky is in a true sense a single point of light. All the light comes through the atmosphere in exactly the same direction, through exactly the same atmospheric turbulence, and thus is bent in exactly the same way. So when it gets to your eye, the amount of light you see varies. It also strikes (primarily) only a single receptor ('pixel') in your eye. \n\nOn the other hand, light from a planet is different. Each of a few receptors in your eye sees a large number of light rays coming from the planet, each of which has been bent differently by the atmosphere (since the planet has size on the sky, they are arriving in slightly different directions). Some of these rays will become brighter, some dimmer. But because they all illuminate the same receptor in your eye, that receptor only sees the total amount of light hitting it. There will be about the same number of enhanced rays as dimmed rays, so you experience a steady light, not a twinkle."
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Not a simple question, but  this is two main reasons.\n\n1) Brightness of the Star Play a part.   Assume uniform Atmosphere.\n\n2) The Atmosphere also another part.  Assume stars of the same brightness.\n\n1)  Brightness of the Star Play a part.\nBrighter the Star, less likely the twinkle.   Look at the Moon, does it go Bink Bink?  Too Bright.\n\nBut Dimer stars, under the same Atmospheric conditions, may Bink.\n\n2) The Atmosphere also another part.\nThe Atmosphere is not uniform, look at the sky during the day, sometime, it clear blue,  and other time clouds mass abound.\n\nThe Atmosphere is like a thin soup, with some sliver of bread in it,.  using that example, when the Stars of the same brightness is in the Sky,  imagine when a sliver of bread blocks lightly one of the stars, thus one Bink, and another don't.\n\nIt Real life, Stars are not of the same brightness, and the Atmosphere is not always uniform.  making the issue complex.
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Stars are big fiery balls of gas. Essentially the gases cluster together and become stars through gravity and fusion. It's a rather complicated process; check the link below for a more detailed explanation.\n\nStars appear to be in our sky because they are in space. Most stars appear to be small points of light, although many of these stars are smaller than our sun. The sun simply appears larger because it is much nearer to the Earth.
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You can tell whether a point of light in the dark sky is a satellite or star usually by whether it moves or not. Stars are very far away so they look stationary. Satellites usually moves across the sky. Whether or not the the satellites are Japanese, American, or Russian, you have to look up the satellite in astronomy programs that plot satellite trajectories. You can't tell just by looking.\n\nAlso, some bright lights can be just airplanes flying at high altitude.
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The stars emit particles that reach us.
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STARS AND NEBULAE.\n\nMost of the things you can see in the night sky are stars: a few thousand are visible to the unaided eye. A star is a hot ball of mostly hydrogen gas; the Sun is an example of a typical, ordinary star. Gravity keeps the gas from evaporating into space, and pressure due to the star's high temperature and density keeps the ball from shrinking. In the core of the star, the temperature and densities are high enough to sustain nuclear fusion reactions, and the energy produced by these reactions works its way to the surface and radiates into space as heat and light. When the fuel for the fusion reactions is depleted, the structure of the star changes. The process of building up heavier elements from lighter ones by nuclear reactions, and adjusting the internal structure to balance gravity and pressure, is called stellar evolution. \nLooking at a star through a telescope can tell us many of its important properties. The color of a star tells us its temperature, and the temperature depends on some combination of the star's mass and evolutionary phase. Usually, observations also allow us to find the luminosity of the star, or the rate at which it radiates energy as heat and light. \nAll stars visible to the unaided eye are in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Milky Way is system of roughly 100 billion stars, along with a great deal of interstellar material. The galaxy is shaped like a flattened disk embedded in a round, faint halo. Gravity keeps the stars from drifting away, and the motions of the stars keep the system from falling in on itself. The Milky Way has no distinct edge - the distribution of stars tapers off gradually with increasing distance from the center. The SDSS detects stars more than a million times fainter than can be seen with the unaided eye, far enough to see the outer structure of the Milky Way. \nStar Colors and Luminosities: The H-R Diagram\nAstronomers often make plots of the luminosities of stars compared to their colors. The first such charts were made in the early twentieth century, when astronomers took spectra of thousands of stars, then placed the spectra into a sequence based on the appearance of several different features. The classes of stars were given different letters as names; in order of decreasing temperature, they are OBAFGKMLT. The hottest stars are class O, while the coolest are class T. Two astronomers, Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell, independently started to wonder what would happen if they compared stars' luminosities to their spectral classifications (or, alternatively, to their temperatures). They knew that some stars were hotter and more luminous than the sun, and that others were cooler and less luminous. Hertzsprung and Russell found that 90% of the stars fell into a narrow band they termed the "main sequence." Today, we call this type of plot a Hertzsprung-Russell (or H-R) diagram. \nAstronomers further divide each letter into ten categories from 0 to 9, with 0 being the hottest star in that spectral class and 9 being the coolest. So, a B1 star is hotter than a B2 star, and a B9 star is hotter than an A0 star. Our own sun is at the "hot" end of the G range with a surface temperature of 5,770° K; therefore, it's called a G2 star. \nSpectral classes give us a convenient way to refer to most types of stars - from O0, the hottest at over 25,000° K, down to T9, the coolest failed stars at 1,000° K. Each spectral type of star is associated with a specific color: all G-type stars like the sun are yellow, all M-type stars appear red, and all B-type stars are bluish. Thus, this system of letters and numbers tells us where a star is on the horizontal (color or temperature) axis of the H-R diagram. \nTwo alternative systems tell us approximately where on the vertical (luminosity) axis a star can be found. One system uses absolute magnitude, a measure of luminosity derived from the apparent magnitude, or brightness of the star
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The light from the stars is distorted by charged particles and dust in our atmosphere which is in constant motion, hense the twinkling.
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At the zenith, you can observer an astronomical object through the least amount of Earths atmosphere.\n\nThe more atmosphere that the light from the object passes through before hitting your eyes (or telescope), the more blurry the image. This is what causes stars (and planets to a lesser degree) to "twinkle".  It follows that since you are looking through less air, starlight  is also less affected by dust particles and air currents.\n\nStill, cold, thin air = good seeing. (One reason why most of the major ground based observatories are at high altitudes)
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Stars, except for the Sun, although they may be millions of miles in diameter, are very far away.  They appear as point sources even when viewed by telescopes.  The planets in our solar system, much smaller than stars, are closer and can be resolved as disks with a little bit of magnification (field binoculars, for example).\n\nSince the Earth's atmosphere is turbulent, all images viewed up through it tend to "swim."  The result of this is that sometimes a single point in object space gets mapped to two or more points in image space, and also sometimes a single point in object space does not get mapped into any point in image space.  When a star's single point in object space fails to map to at least one point in image space, the star seems to disappear temporarily.  This does not mean the star's light is lost for that moment.  It just means that it didn't get to your eye, it went somewhere else.\n\nSince planets represent several points in object space, it is highly likely that one or more points in the planet's object space get mapped to a points in image space, and the planet's image never winks out.  Each individual ray is twinkling away as badly as any star, but when all of those individual rays are viewed together, the next effect is averaged out to something considerably steadier.\n\nThe result is that stars tend to twinkle, and planets do not.  Other extended objects in space, even very far ones like nebulae, do not twinkle if they are sufficiently large that they have non-zero apparent diameter when viewed from the Earth.
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Some stars might have a solar system, but not all do.  Some stars are actually two "suns" orbiting around one another (called a binary star) but appearing to the unaided eye as a single star.  Some are even three stars together, such as alpha centauri, which is the closest "star" in the sky--though it is actually three stars that look like one.  Some are stellar clusters, where many of these "suns" are all bunched close enough to appear as one star.  Some are entire galaxies, with billions of stars, but so far away that they appear to be a single star from earth.  Some are stellar clusters, where many of these "suns" are all bunched close enough to appear as one star.\n\nSome things you might think are stars are actually planets.\n\nSome are dead "suns," where the fuel for the nuclear fusion that makes the sun burn has all been expended, leaving a big mass of iron, that glows white-hot for many years before turning dark.  If you look at these so-called "white dwarves" through a powerful telescope, you can see a faint ring of matter that has been blown away in the explosion that came when the star died.  Some stars are huge, and some are small.\n\nSome of the stars we have been able to see have solar systems of their own, which we detect by the slight wobble caused by the gravitational pull of the planet (or planets) as it orbits.