What was the first Earth creature to go into space? Not a dog, but a fruit fly. Insects and arachnids have been mini-astronauts for over sixty years. They have also inspired the naming of heavenly objects.

Each day for six months after the winter solstice, the Sun rises a bit higher in the sky. It reaches the maximum height at the summer solstice, the longest day. Evidence of rituals and festivals at the times of the solstices goes back thousands of years.

Sometimes the media are full of stories about a supermoon. They may even include dire predictions of earthquakes, tsunamis and other disasters. What is a supermoon and should you be worried - or excited?

Light pollution isn't just a problem for astronomers. It means the loss of an amenity for all of us now and the generations that follow. It affects the natural world, can ruin our health, wastes resources, and what's more, we're paying for it!

After all the fuss about Pluto, everybody knows that it's a dwarf planet now. But it's only one of five. Here's a mini tour of all five, including the one where a heatwave is the temperature of Antarctica, the one shaped like an egg, and one whose year is over 500 Earth years long. All aboard!

Join the dwarf planet tour. It will take you so far away that the Sun seems to be no more than another bright star. You'll see a dwarf planet the shape of an American football, one whose a month is the same length as its day, and the one that upset the fans of Pluto.

How do asteroids get their names? You have to discover an asteroid to name it, but you still can't name it after yourself or your cat. You also can't buy the naming right, though someone might give their naming right to you.

Will a secret organization and an evil genius succeed in destroying a big physics experiment and killing the scientists involved? Can George and Annie find and disarm the quantum bomb? How is Schrödinger's cat involved? Another great blend of fantasy and science from Lucy and Stephen Hawking.

Why did the British government in 1820 want to build an astronomical observatory eight thousand miles from home? Which astronomers are buried on the premises and which one went home after a year in the "dismal swamp"? Here are some of the stories of the Royal Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope.

We no longer see the heavens as perfect and the stars as eternal and unchanging. Even the Universe had a beginning, and everything that we observe changes and evolves. Many of these changes involve cosmic collisions.