Begin your journey by finding the constellation of Orion in the night sky and learning about the legend of Orion.

Discover more about patterns in the night sky, how they were used for navigation and contribute by constructing your own constellation.

The Open University are involved in a project to map the stars, find out more about their involvement.

Discover the amazing process, happening over thousands of years, that causes stars to form. Find out what makes up a star and study the Orion nebula.

Stars need a power source, since they are constantly radiating away energy into space as light and heat – if they didn’t have one, they would gradually fade away and cool.

What happens when a star runs out of fuel? Stars take different journeys based on their mass. Some form material for planets, some explode as beautiful supernovae, some gradually fade as white dwarfs.

The galaxies in the Universe appear to be moving away from each other. The origin of the Universe is described by the Big Bang theory. Find out what the night sky can reveal about how it all began.

Galaxies are categorised according to their shape. Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is thought to be a barred spiral galaxy. Get involved with classifying galaxies yourself.

Light travels at different wavelengths. Find out how this affects what we see in the night sky and how instruments help us to see more of the beauty of space.

Is where we are (half way along a spiral arm in an undistinguished galaxy) particularly special? Has the origin of life on Earth been enabled because of the type of star our planet orbits, and where that star sits in the galaxy?

Use the Orion nebula to discover how stars and planets formed.

Planets that orbit other stars could be similar to any of the planets in our Solar System, including Earth.