Rosetta went where no space mission had been before! It caught up with a comet in deep space and went into orbit around it. Its lander Philae was the first ever to land on a comet. At the end of the mission, Rosetta also landed on the comet to join it and Philae on the comet's journey.

Autumn equinox and autumn sky, discoveries and discoverers, an ancient festival that marked the transition from the light to darkness. Can you identify them?

Saturn: magnificent rings, a planet-sized moon, and dozens of smaller moons. Three spacecraft had flown by before Cassini-Huygens was launched in 1997. But this mission wouldn't just fly by and snap some photos. It was going to get up close and personal.

Google doodles are little drawings and animations that incorporate the Google name into a presentation of a person or event of note. Here are five doodles with an astronomy theme, including asteroids, a lunar eclipse and how the speed of light was calculated by observing Jupiter and Io.

The starter's pistol for the space race was fired on October 4, 1957. It was in the form of a small highly-polished sphere that orbited the Earth every 98 minutes. This was the Soviet Union's Sputnik, Earth's first artificial satellite. It shook up the United States, and there was more to come.

Neptune is the planet discovered mathematically and whose detection led to a heated rivalry between British and French astronomers. But who was the first person actually to see Neptune?

Saturn has lots of moons - 92 known ones. They are remarkable in many ways, but perhaps the strangest one is the misshapen and unpredictable Hyperion.

Autumn begins on the equinox, the day the Sun crosses the equator. The earliest known civilizations celebrated the equinoxes, and they're still celebrated in many places. One of the biggest autumn celebrations is the Chinese Moon Festival. A traditional Chinese garden has a moon-watching pavilion.

What is the thread that unites: the Wizard Earl, the first recorded use of an astronomical telescope, Sir Walter Raleigh, Virginia, the Gunpowder Plot, and the Smithsonian? Syon Park, a historic estate on the River Thames in England.

Caroline Herschel was an intelligent young woman trapped in domestic servitude by her mother. Her brother William rescued her and trained her as a singer. After he discovered the planet Uranus, the two of them ended up forming a great partnership whose work revolutionized the study of astronomy.