Bbc The Sky at Night Cosmic Fireworks (1988)

Looking back on the major stories of the year - from the New Horizons mission to the most distant world we have ever visited to the release of the first-ever picture of a black hole. The team relive the highlights and uncover the latest developments.

The British weather is often the enemy of stargazers up and down the country. A forecast of a couple of hours of cloud cover will disappoint even the most determined amateur astronomers.

The Sky at Night team explores the threat of an asteroid impact on earth. Around 2,300 asteroids have been identified as ‘potentially hazardous', and it's thought that a million ‘near-earth objects' are yet to be accounted for.

2022 marks the fiftieth year since an astronaut last stepped on the moon's surface. We look back at the legacy of the Apollo programme and forward to the future of lunar exploration.

In October 2017, astronomers made a spectacular discovery - they spotted the first ever object to visit our solar system from outer space. They gave it a suitably exotic name… 'Oumuamua. Its discovery set off a hurricane of press speculation and a major scientific investigation. To investigate this spectacular astronomical detective story, The Sky at Night goes to Queen's University in Belfast, which has become the centre of scientific research on this cosmic visitor. When they first spotted it, all scientists knew was that it was small, it was travelling fast, and it came from outside our solar system.

In February 2018, news broke that astronomers had seen the cosmic dawn - the moment when stars first formed, flooding the universe with light. What's remarkable is that this incredible event was discovered by an instrument the size of a ping-pong table in a remote corner of Western Australia. Chris Lintott travels to the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory to find out how they did it and what else the extraordinary radio telescopes there can tell us about the universe.

The team travel to the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands where they take control of some of the world's largest telescopes to view the most spectacular sights in the night sky.

All good travel guides need a map, and the team unveil the most detailed 3D map of the Milky Way ever produced. A map that reveals that there may be 50 per cent more stars in the galaxy than we previously thought. American astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson gives us a guided tour of the strangest stars we have ever observed, and we discover that the Milky Way may already be colliding with our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda.

The Sky at Night is embarking on a journey into the future as we explore how space will revolutionise life on Earth over the next 50 years. As humanity's reach extends into the cosmos, we face unprecedented challenges, from redefining what it means to be an astronaut to confronting our own space junk and dealing with the impact of life in space on our Earth-adapted bodies. With privileged early access to a groundbreaking new report from the Royal Society on humanity's future in space, the Sky at Night team are on a mission to find our destiny among the stars – our place in space.

Scientists have spent hundreds of years observing the planets with telescopes and over fifty exploring the solar system through space travel, so you might have thought they knew our cosmic neighbourhood pretty well.