Although the night sky has two lizards, the classical world wasn't enthralled by small reptiles. Both Lacerta and Chamaeleon constellations date from about the 17th century, which is considered modern. Lacerta is home to a fiery dwarf, a puffy planet and one of the most energetic known galaxies.

The Milky Way contains billions of stars and planets, but Earth is to us the most beautiful. The thin skin of our atmosphere protects us from many space hazards, but can't protect life on Earth from human-made hazards. Tony Meyers's new film A Beautiful Planet 3D says only we can do that.

How does the composition of a star affect the temperature? In 1925 a young woman solved this puzzle in her doctoral thesis. Her analysis was a great breakthrough in astrophysics. Otto Struve described it as “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

The objects in the Messier catalog that are the farthest south are two star clusters. M6 is also called the Butterfly Cluster and M7 is also known Ptolemy's Cluster. They're splendid objects seen in their glory in the southern skies, but if you live in the far north you can't see them at all.

Chamaeleons lived in lands exotic to 16th-century Europeans. Yet although color-changing lizards are fascinating, Chamaeleon the constellation is a small, dim southern sky constellation with no associated mythology. Why does it even exist? Is there anything of interest there?

Follow a steep road into California's Berkeley hills to find the Lawrence Hall of Science (LHS). It's the public science center of the University of California Berkeley, and delights visitors of all ages with the wonders of science. A bonus is a spectacular panoramic view of the San Francisco Bay.

Mars has two tiny shapeless moons. The larger moon Phobos zooms around Mars so quickly, that it seems to rise in the west and set in the east twice a day. And it hasn't had easy time of it. Long ago it was nearly shattered by a giant impact. It's now being pulled towards Mars and its destruction.

What devastated the dinosaurs, excavated a great hole in the ground, and broke windows in Russia? What produced the life we know on Earth, but could also destroy it? The answer: impacts from space. It's the subject of the planetarium presentation "Incoming!".

By the late 19th century all the outer planets were known to have moons, yet Mars had none. At last, in 1877 American astronomer Asaph Hall found two Martian moons. Why did it take so long? And why did Hall call them Fear and Terror?

Arachnophobes needn't worry about this tarantula. It's not a big spider, it's a big nebula that looks a bit like a spider in some photos. It's also so far away that its light takes 170,000 years to get here. Stars are born there, stars die there, and it's a spectacular object.