Though the Milky Way and Andromeda formed billions of years ago, evidence shows they have very different evolutionary histories despite sharing the same cosmological neighbourhood.

There’s a picturesque early evening scene at the start of February as the Moon passes dazzling Venus and fading Saturn.

The Horsehead Nebula is a small dark nebula in the constellation Orion. Resembling a horse's head is located just to the south of Alnitak, the easternmost star of Orion's Belt. Nearby, the Flame Nebula appears like its name in astrophotos.

Messier 67 is an ancient open cluster in the southern, equatorial half of Cancer. It was discovered by Johann Gottfried Koehler in 1779. It is a truly ancient cluster, with some astronomers calculating that it’s as old as five billion years!

The Quadrantid meteor shower kicks off the meteor-watching calendar, peaking this year on 3 January. Renowned for its reliability, it consistently ranks among the best annual meteor displays.

Mercury ends the year on a high as a pre-dawn object during primarily the second half of December.

The observing year comes to a close with a bang as brilliant Jupiter comes to opposition on 7 December. Across the whole of the month the dominant gas giant planet offers its best observing circumstances of the year.

Brilliant and beautiful Venus is an increasingly conspicuous sight soon after sunset.

This eerie, dark silhouette is a cometary globule designated GN 16.43.7.01. Despite their name, cometary globules have nothing to do with comets, beyond having a similar shape of a dusty head with a tail.

In the 1997 movie "Contact," adapted from Carl Sagan's 1985 novel, the lead character, scientist Ellie Arroway, takes a space-alien-built wormhole ride to the star Vega. She emerges inside a snowstorm of debris encircling the star – but no obvious planets are visible. It looks like the filmmakers got it right.