Radmila Topalovic
The Perseids meteor shower.
mLu.fotos from Germany, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
How many stars can you see from wherever you are? 10? 100? Think of all the stars we could see on a dark clear night away from city lights, maybe 1000? Now think of all the stars we can’t see without a telescope, all of the stars in our universe – it’s a really big number, 200 billion trillion stars! That’s a 2 with 23 zeros after it. Some of these stars are much bigger and more massive than the Sun, some are much hotter, some are very young and active, covered in dust and spitting out fast jets of particles, some have run out of hydrogen and are bloated, red supergiants and some are small enough to fit into London and are mind-blowingly dense. We’re talking Mount Everest squeezed into a sugar cube, that dense.
Then there are the black holes, bending space-time and the laws of physics, too cool for school, pulling everything in beyond their imaginary event horizon and refusing to let it all back out. Black holes also come in a range of sizes and masses, we have a huge one in the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, roughly 4 million Sun’s worth of gobbled matter. Our Sun, along with 400 billion stars, merrily orbit the centre of the galaxy, receiving a glamorous tour of the Milky Way and spectacular views of the Universe.
I have lost count of the number of times my friends and students have asked me to identify a bright thing in the sky that they’ve seen. We can track the movements of the Sun, Moon and planets (and other objects in our solar system) relative to the more distant stars in our galaxy. We see them enter and leave constellations (star patterns) in a band around the sky called the ecliptic, 12 of these make up a belt called the zodiac. We can see 5 planets with the naked eye, you can distinguish them from the stars by the nature of their light – they don’t twinkle. A bright object moving steadily across the sky is a satellite, NASA’s Spot the Station website will help you find the biggest and best satellite - the International Space Station, where there are six people on board.
If we’re lucky we’ll see a comet, a rocky, icy snow ball from the outer solar system, or more likely we’ll spot shooting stars or meteors, bits of cometary debris flaring up as they travel through the Earth’s atmosphere.
Along with our astrophysicist and celestial map-maker Dominic Ford and our dedicated team of astronomers at the world-renowned Royal Observatory Greenwich in London we do the hard work for you with our 2026 Guide to the Night Sky and Night Sky Almanac 2026, designed to help you plan your stargazing sessions from pretty much any location. We show you how to find the planets, when the best meteor showers take place and tips to improve your chances of spotting them, and we explain the monthly cycle of our much-loved Moon and its role in celestial phenomena such as eclipses.
To get you going this Autumn, look for the Summer Triangle high in the southwest, made up of three stars called Deneb, Vega and Altair. The winged horse Pegasus is in the southeast, and the zodiacal constellation Pisces also comes into view, bringing with it Saturn, best seen around midnight on 21 September. My advice? If it’s a clear night, go out and take a look, it’s your night sky – enjoy!
Learn more
From beautiful astrophotography to the bestselling guide to the night sky, we have something for everyone who is interested in exploring the mysteries of our solar system and beyond. Explore the collection.