Imagine the horror: Something is eating the Moon, leaving its face covered in blood. This was how people once viewed lunar eclipses. Find out what actually causes a lunar eclipse, why the Moon may turn red during an eclipse, and where a lunar eclipse becomes a solar eclipse.

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!

Lick Observatory lies high on a mountaintop overlooking Silicon Valley. Known for major contributions to astronomy, it also has some unusual features. Its benefactor James Lick is buried under one of the main telescopes and its original seismogram of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake is on display.

Leo is a Zodiac constellation and its stars have represented a lion for over four thousand years. Leo contains one of the brightest stars in the sky and one of the dimmest, as well as a selection of spiral galaxies loved by amateur astronomers. And what was Regulus's dark secret?

Here's the story of Guillaume Le Gentil who went to India to observe the transit of Venus in 1761 and took eleven years to get home again. War and weather conspired to prevent his making observations and illness further delayed his return. Was he the unluckiest astronomer ever?

Pluto's not the last planet, it's the first Kuiper Belt Object. The Kuiper Belt is made up of millions of icy bits left over from the beginning of the Solar System. It starts at 30 AU - that's 30 times farther from the Sun than the Earth. From there it stretches for another 2 billion miles!

Pluto was once the last outpost of the Solar System. Now we realize that it's the gateway to the Kuiper Belt, a disk made up of rubble left over from the formation of the Solar System. The Kuiper Belt is big and it's cold and the Sun would just look like a bright star from there.

An observatory that a king built to watch the 1769 transit of Venus. The place where official time for London used to be set. Where a murderer was sometimes in attendance when the King walked in the gardens. Find out more about the history of Kew Observatory.

Four moons circling Jupiter? A sensation when Galileo discovered them in the early 17th century! They're still sensational. Find out which one is bigger than a planet, which seethes with volcanic activity and has mountains taller than Everest, and where there is an ocean that could harbor life.

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.