question: How did early scientists and astronomers fathom the concept of a planet, and planets, and stars while being entirely earthbound without telescopes or orbital views?
comment: They didn't know that it was other things in the solar system. The term "planet" comes from the Greek term "asteres planetai" - which means "wandering star". They knew that it was something strange, but until the first telescopes were turned to the sky nobody knew what was going on up there. Even the simplest of telescopes can resolve the Galilean moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus.
passages: An identifiable native Indian astronomical tradition remained active throughout the medieval period and into the 16th or 17th century, especially within the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics.
  
  Section::::History.
  
  Some of the earliest forms of astronomy can be dated to the period of Indus Valley Civilization, or earlier. Some cosmological concepts are present in the Vedas, as are notions of the movement of heavenly bodies and the course of the year.
   Edmund Halley succeeded Flamsteed as Astronomer Royal in England and succeeded in predicting the return in 1758 of the comet that bears his name. Sir William Herschel found the first new planet, Uranus, to be observed in modern times in 1781. The gap between the planets Mars and Jupiter disclosed by the Titius–Bode law was filled by the discovery of the asteroids Ceres and Pallas in 1801 and 1802 with many more following.
  
  At first, astronomical thought in America was based on Aristotelian philosophy, but interest in the new astronomy began to appear in Almanacs as early as 1659.
   BULLET::::- 1825 – Pierre Laplace completes his study of gravitation, the stability of the Solar System, tides, the precession of the equinoxes, the libration of the Moon, and Saturn's rings in "Mécanique Céleste"
  
  BULLET::::- 1838 – Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel measures the parallax of the star 61 Cygni, refuting one of the oldest arguments against heliocentrism.
  
  BULLET::::- 1840 — John W. Draper takes a daguerreotype of the Moon, the first astronomical photograph.
  
  BULLET::::- 1843 – John Adams predicts the existence and location of Neptune from irregularities in the orbit of Uranus
   Ancient astronomers were able to differentiate between stars and planets, as stars remain relatively fixed over the centuries while planets will move an appreciable amount during a comparatively short time.
  
  Section::::Early history.
   Astronomy played a considerable part in religious matters for fixing the dates of festivals and determining the hours of the night. The titles of several temple books are preserved recording the movements and phases of the sun, moon and stars. The rising of Sirius (Egyptian: Sopdet, Greek: Sothis) at the beginning of the inundation was a particularly important point to fix in the yearly calendar.
  
  Writing in the Roman era, Clement of Alexandria gives some idea of the importance of astronomical observations to the sacred rites:
   Astronomy was advanced during the Shunga Empire and many star catalogues were produced during this time. The Shunga period is known as the "Golden age of astronomy in India".
  
  It saw the development of calculations for the motions and places of various planets, their rising and setting, conjunctions, and the calculation of eclipses.
   Astronomy is the oldest of the natural sciences, dating back to antiquity, with its origins in the religious, mythological, cosmological, calendrical, and astrological beliefs and practices of prehistory: vestiges of these are still found in astrology, a discipline long interwoven with public and governmental astronomy. It was not completely separated in Europe (see astrology and astronomy) during the Copernican Revolution starting in 1543. In some cultures, astronomical data was used for astrological prognostication. The study of astronomy has received financial and social support from many institutions, especially the Church, which was its largest source of support between the 12th century to the Enlightenment.
   The last stages in the development of Babylonian astronomy took place during the time of the Seleucid Empire (323–60 BC). In the 3rd century BC, astronomers began to use "goal-year texts" to predict the motions of the planets. These texts compiled records of past observations to find repeating occurrences of ominous phenomena for each planet. About the same time, or shortly afterwards, astronomers created mathematical models that allowed them to predict these phenomena directly, without consulting past records. A notable Babylonian astronomer from this time was Seleucus of Seleucia, who was a supporter of the heliocentric model.
   For many thousands of years, astronomers maintained a geocentric world view and did not recognize the existence of a Solar System. Most believed Earth was stationary at the center of the Universe and categorically different from the divine or ethereal objects that moved through the sky. Although the Greek philosopher Aristarchus of Samos had speculated on a heliocentric reordering of the cosmos, Nicolaus Copernicus in the 16th century developed a mathematically predictive heliocentric system. His 17th-century successors, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton, developed a modern understanding of physics that led to the gradual acceptance of the idea that Earth moves around the Sun and that the planets are governed by the same physical laws that govern Earth. In more recent times, this led to the investigation of geological phenomena such as mountains and craters and seasonal meteorological phenomena such as clouds, dust storms, and ice caps on the other planets.
   In 1900 and 1901, Harvard College Observatory director William Henry Pickering led two searches for trans-Neptunian planets. The first was begun by Danish astronomer Hans Emil Lau who, after studying the data on the orbit of Uranus from 1690 to 1895, concluded that one trans-Neptunian planet alone could not account for the discrepancies in its orbit, and postulated the position of two planets he believed were responsible. The second was launched when Gabriel Dallet suggested that a single trans-Neptunian planet lying at 47 AU could account for the motion of Uranus. Pickering agreed to examine plates for any suspected planets. In neither case were any found.
   In the 17th century, the Mughal Empire saw a synthesis between Islamic and Hindu astronomy, where Islamic observational instruments were combined with Hindu computational techniques. While there appears to have been little concern for planetary theory, Muslim and Hindu astronomers in India continued to make advances in observational astronomy and produced nearly a hundred "Zij" treatises. Humayun built a personal observatory near Delhi, while Jahangir and Shah Jahan were also intending to build observatories but were unable to do so. After the decline of the Mughal Empire, it was a Hindu king, Jai Singh II of Amber, who attempted to revive both the Islamic and Hindu traditions of astronomy which were stagnating in his time. In the early 18th century, he built several large observatories called Yantra Mandirs in order to rival Ulugh Beg's Samarkand observatory and in order to improve on the earlier Hindu computations in the "Siddhantas" and Islamic observations in "Zij-i-Sultani". The instruments he used were influenced by Islamic astronomy, while the computational techniques were derived from Hindu astronomy.
   Timeline of Solar System astronomy
  
  Timeline of Solar System astronomy
  
  Section::::Antiquity.
  
  BULLET::::- 2nd millennium BC – earliest possible date for the composition of the Babylonian Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa, a 7th-century BC copy of a list of observations of the motions of the planet Venus, and the oldest planetary table currently known.
  
  BULLET::::- 2nd millennium BC – Babylonian astronomers identify the inner planets Mercury and Venus and the outer planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, which would remain the only known planets until the invention of the telescope in early modern times.
   BULLET::::- 1543 – Copernicus publishes his heliocentric theory in "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium"
  
  BULLET::::- c. 1570 – Tycho Brahe founds the first modern astronomical observatory.
  
  BULLET::::- 1577 – Tycho Brahe uses parallax to prove that comets are distant entities and not atmospheric phenomena.
  
  Section::::17th Century.
  
  BULLET::::- 1609 – Johannes Kepler states his first two empirical laws of planetary motion, stating that the orbits of the planets are elliptical rather than circular, and thus resolving many ancient problems with planetary models.
   A scientific field in which the Greek and Hellenistic world did make progress was astronomy. This was partly for practical reasons: the sky had long served as compass, clock, and calendar. Also, the regularity of the movements of heavenly bodies made them simpler to describe than earthly phenomena. But not "too" simple: though the sun, moon and "fixed stars" seemed regular in their celestial circuits, the "wandering stars"—the planets—were puzzling; they seemed to move at variable speeds, and even to reverse direction. Writes Weinberg: "Much of the story of the emergence of modern science deals with the effort, extending over two millennia, to explain the peculiar motions of the planets."
   In the early 18th century, Jai Singh II of Amber invited European Jesuit astronomers to one of his Yantra Mandir observatories, who had bought back the astronomical tables compiled by Philippe de La Hire in 1702. After examining La Hire's work, Jai Singh concluded that the observational techniques and instruments used in European astronomy were inferior to those used in India at the time - it is uncertain whether he was aware of the Copernican Revolution via the Jesuits. He did, however, employ the use of telescopes. 
   Section::::Viewpoint of historians.:Mario Biagioli.
   In the 4th century BC Greek astronomers were the first to develop a three dimensional model to describe the motion of the planets around the earth. Later, a slowly developing debate regarding the earth verses the sun as the centre of this movement grew, culminating in the work of Copernicus who posited a mathematically supported system where the planets revolved around the sun. His work was later expanded by Galileo and Kepler.
   In 1500, Nilakantha Somayaji of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics, in his "Tantrasangraha", revised Aryabhata's model. In his "Aryabhatiyabhasya", a commentary on Aryabhata's "Aryabhatiya", he developed a planetary model where Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn orbit the Sun, which in turn orbits Earth, similar to the Tychonic system later proposed by Tycho Brahe in the late 16th century. Most astronomers of the Kerala school who followed him accepted his planetary model.
  
  Section::::History.:Medieval Muslim astronomy.
   Planets in astrology
  
  Planets in astrology have a meaning different from the modern astronomical understanding of what a planet is. Before the age of telescopes, the night sky was thought to consist of two very similar components: fixed stars, which remained motionless in relation to each other, and "wandering stars" ( "asteres planetai"), which moved relative to the fixed stars over the course of the year.
   BULLET::::- 1951 – Kuiper argues for an annular reservoir of comets between 40-100 astronomical units from the Sun, the Kuiper belt
  
  Section::::1958-1976.
  
  BULLET::::- 1959 — Explorer 6 sends the first image of the entire earth from Space.
  
  BULLET::::- 1959 – Luna 3 sends the first images of another celestial body, the Moon, from space, including its unseen far side.
  
  BULLET::::- 1962 – The Mariner 2 Venus flyby performs the first closeup observations of another planet
  
  BULLET::::- 1964 – The Mariner 4 spacecraft provides the first detailed images of the surface of Mars
   The Babylonians were the first to recognize that astronomical phenomena are periodic and to apply mathematics to their predictions. The oldest known significant astronomical text is Tablet 63 of the "Enûma Anu Enlil" collection, the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa, which lists the first and the last visible risings of Venus over a period of about 21 years. It is the earliest evidence that planetary phenomena were recognised as periodic.
   BULLET::::- 134 BC – Hipparchus discovers the precession of the equinoxes
  
  BULLET::::- 87 BC — The Antikythera mechanism, the earliest known computer, is built. It is designed to predict the movements of the Planets.
  
  BULLET::::- 28 BC – Chinese history book Book of Han makes earliest known dated record of sunspot.
  
  BULLET::::- c. 150 CE – Claudius Ptolemy completes his Almagest that codifies the astronomical knowledge of his time and cements the geocentric model in the West
  
  Section::::Middle Ages.
   Section::::Telescopic observations.
  
  The first exploration of the Solar System was conducted by telescope, when astronomers first began to map those objects too faint to be seen with the naked eye.
   Colonial Americans John Winthrop (a Harvard College professor) and David Rittenhouse authored publications that described their telescopic observations of the 1761 and 1769 transits of Venus soon after those events occurred. Other Americans, some of whom taught at Harvard, also wrote about astronomy and used telescopes when observing celestial bodies and events before 1790 (see also: Colonial American Astronomy).
   BULLET::::- 1610 – Galileo Galilei discovers Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io, sees Saturn's planetary rings (but does not recognize that they are rings), and observes the phases of Venus, disproving the Ptolemaic system, though not the geocentric model
  
  BULLET::::- 1619 – Johannes Kepler states his third empirical law of planetary motion
  
  BULLET::::- 1655 – Giovanni Domenico Cassini discovers Jupiter's Great Red Spot
  
  BULLET::::- 1656 – Christiaan Huygens identifies Saturn's rings as rings and discovers Titan
  
  BULLET::::- 1665 – Cassini determines the rotational speeds of Jupiter, Mars, and Venus
  
  BULLET::::- 1672 – Cassini discovers Iapetus and Rhea
  
raw_presuppositions: Scientists used terms like planets before being able to see any other planets out there. 
raw_corrections: They knew there were objects that were different than stars because they moved when stars would stay constant. They named those objects planets. 