Mary Kay Burns, age 14, of Hobart, IA for her question:

Is the evening star always the same?

The evening star is the first bright lantern to appear in the sky after sunset. It shines with a steady, unblinking light ‑ which tells us that this so‑called star is really a planet and not a true star at all, It is one of the planets of our Solar System, but which one?

The ancient star‑gazers knew of only five other planets, for only five of them can be seen without a telescope. They called them planets, meaning wanderers, because their paths took them wandering across the bate round of fixed stars. Any one of them can warder from the eastern to the western sky and any one of them can play the role of the evening star or the morning star., In our latitudes, Mercury is too low in the sky to make much of a show as an evening or morning star. Mars is brighter than Jupiter or Saturn and Venus is the brightest evening star of them all.