As the long days of summer slip away and the skies darken earlier, the first stars of autumn appear. The centerpiece is the Great Square of Pegasus. It's the key to other autumn sights, including the most distant object you can see without a telescope - it's a billion billion miles away.

Every 75 years or so a very special member of the Solar System swoops close to the Sun, becoming visible in our skies like a cosmic ghost. Read about Halley’s Comet, the most famous comet of all.

Three beautiful planets - Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - are all visible to the unaided eye. If you have binoculars or a telescope, you can also see some of the moons and other features. Here's a beginner's guide to the planets which lie beyond Earth.

It's the king of the Roman gods and comet-killer, containing two and a half times the mass of all the other planets put together and with the shortest day of any planet in the Solar System. It's Jupiter! Find out more.

One planet in the Solar System dominates the others, so it's fitting that it's named for Jupiter, the king of the Roman gods. Jupiter has moons galore and monster storms, and it spins so fast that its day is only ten hours long.

Need a break from what you're doing? Want to test your astronomy vocabulary and knowledge? Find out about astronomy games and quizzes on bellaonline.

We take the Moon for granted, because it's so close to us and easy to see. But it's a beautiful and interesting object as it goes through its monthly changes. If you use a pair of binoculars, you can learn to recognize many of its main features. Some of them are visible without binoculars too.

The Moon has no air, no sound, no weather and no liquid water. But you could see the Earth in the sky, shining more brightly than the Moon does from Earth. And since gravity is weaker, you could jump quite high and the footprint you left might last a million years.

What do poets see when they look at the heavens? And astronomers? Are the experiences completely different or different sides of the same sense of wonder? This collection of poems, edited by a poet and an astrophysicist, is a treasure trove. There's something here for everyone.

We can see five planets with our unaided eyes. But people often ask how to find them and how to recognize them. Here is a beginner's guide for seeing Mercury and Venus.