The Autumn Equinox takes place on September 22, after which hours of daylight become shorter than hours of night.

The equinoxes in March and September tend to be times when the aurora are seen more often and this year, with an active sun, the chances of seeing them are better still.   

Saturn reaches opposition on September 8 in Aquarius. The ring system is almost edge-on from our perspective so in a telescope the planet looks quite different to its more usual appearance.

Saturn’s rings were first seen through a telescope by Galileo in 1610, although he did not recognise them as such at the time.

Much more recently faint rings have been found around Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune. The rings around the planets are made up of myriad small pieces of ice and rock.

We don’t know exactly how they formed, but possible sources are comets and asteroids getting too close to the giant planets, which then get broken up by their strong gravity, or collisions between the moons of the planets.

Saturn has over 100 identified moons, ranging from objects less than a mile across to Titan, which is larger than the planet Mercury.

Jupiter can be seen in the east from around midnight in the constellation of Taurus and climbs high into the sky in the south before dawn.

The last quarter moon will be nearby Jupiter on the night of the 23rd/24th. Mars is in Gemini and will be observable after midnight, to the left of Jupiter.

Full moon is on September 18 and there will be a small partial eclipse, with eight per cent of the moon passing into the Earth’s shadow, best seen at 3.45am.

In the last week of September the Square Of Pegasus is high in the South (see map) and provides a useful pointer.

Looking at the four stars that make up the shape of the square, a line drawn downwards from the right hand two stars leads first to Saturn and then, low down in the sky, to the star Fomalhaut, which is the southernmost of the ‘first magnitude’ (ie brightest) stars visible from the UK.

Fomalhaut is a young star, 25 years light years away and has rings of dust around it. Unlike the rings around the planets in our Solar System which are the result of destruction, the much larger rings around Fomalhaut are believed to be where new planets are forming.