The Sky at Night

The Sky at Night team travels to the heart of Chile's Atacama Desert to explore one of the most advanced observatories in the world - the Very Large Telescope, or VLT.

A special Question Time edition of the programme, recorded at the University of Exeter as part of the British Science Association's Science Festival.

The panel is chaired by science journalist Dallas Campbell and made up of The Sky at Night presenters Chris Lintott, Maggie Aderin-Pocock and Pete Lawrence, who are joined on stage by Dr Claire Davies, who studies star and planet formation, and Dr Hannah Wakeford, who specialises in the atmospheres of exoplanets.

The panel answer questions covering all things astronomical from The Sky at Night's avid viewers and from audience members. We also hear about updates from the Voyager missions to life on other planets and discover where the panel would want to send future space probes if they had the chance.

In this special episode to mark the end of another season of The Sky at Night, we team up with Radio 4's The Infinite Monkey Cage to talk all things amateur astronomy. Join Maggie, Chris and Pete, alongside Professor Brian Cox and comedians Robin Ince and Dara Ó Briain, in front of a live audience at the BBC's Radio Theatre. Together they discuss their love of stargazing and share their top tips and favourite kit for looking up at the night sky.

Outside the Radio Theatre, Pete hosts a Star Party. He joins fellow amateur astronomers hoping to get views of the Moon, as well as the giant planets Saturn and Jupiter, using binoculars, telescopes – and the naked eye. But will the clouds part for long enough?

We look back at 66 years of stargazing - and cloudy skies - with The Sky at Night, including some very familiar, but much younger, faces. And of course, Sir Patrick Moore.

Pete invites Professor Leigh Fletcher from the University of Leicester to the Star Party. Leigh explains how images from amateur astronomers on Earth have been used to direct the camera onboard Nasa's Juno mission to Jupiter. And amateurs are playing a critical role in processing the data and images sent back from this gas giant.

And Dr George Dransfield meets Dr Martin Archer from Imperial College London to discover how we can get involved with space science - even when it's cloudy. Martin is involved in a Nasa project called Harp, which is asking citizen scientists to listen to outer space. Martin took inspiration from his previous career as a radio DJ to convert plasma waves that travel through space into sound waves. By analysing these sound waves, we can help scientists work out the impact these plasma waves might have on us here on Earth.

The Sky at Night is back for a brand new series, and this month it is delving into Nasa's OSIRIS-REx mission, which last year brought back a sample from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu. The team are finding out what it takes to analyse the tiny pieces of space rock, what they can tell us about how Earth became the planet it is today and may even tell us about the origins of life!

We kick off the episode with a catch-up on some of the astronomical news highlights since we have been off air and a quick history of asteroids. Chris Lintott then meets Professor Sara Russell and Dr Ashley King from the Natural History Museum in London, who were both involved with the Osiris Rex mission to Bennu. Chris discovers the challenges it encountered, from unexpected landing surfaces to problems opening the sample jar once it had returned. Chris then goes on to hold a piece of the asteroid itself and finds out about Sara and Ashley's work on the space rock and the complex picture it is giving of Bennu's history. By understanding the journey the asteroid has been on, they can learn more about the conditions in which the Earth formed and how our planet became the water rich place it is today.

Meanwhile, Maggie Aderin-Pocock heads to Diamond Light Source to meet Dr Sharif Ahmed. He explains how the very large machine housed there produces light 10 billion times brighter than the sun, from which powerful X-rays are created, allowing scientists to analyse the very smallest of samples.

Finally, George Dransfield heads to Royal Holloway University to meet Dr Queenie Chan, who is looking for tiny bubbles of liquid in the space rock samples, in which she may discover the secrets of how the building blocks of life could have formed.

And as ever, our resident astronomer, Pete Lawrence, is back to tell us what can be seen in this month's night sky.