The order of the Planets

I still haven’t done a blog posting about Judy Parkinson’s “i before e (except after c)” but on Eggheads I came across a useful mnemonic that isn’t in it – though some variants of it are. It was a way of remembering the order of the planets –

My very easy method just speeds up naming planets!
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.


I also learned from Eggheads that Venus has a day longer than its year – i.e. it takes longer to rotate on its axis than it does to revolve around the sun. A day on Venus lasts 243 Earth days whilst its orbit takes 225 days. Also unusually it is the only planet apart from Uranus that orbits in the opposite direction to the Earth.