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We will teach you to identify 3 constellations, 2 stars, and 1 planet. Betelgeuse will also teach you how to navigate at night using the stars.

"Harps employs an indirect method of detection that infers the existence of orbiting planets from the way their gravity makes a parent star appear to twitch in its motion across the sky. "Our new observations with Harps mean that about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet," said team leader Xavier Bonfils from the Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers de Grenoble, France. "Because red dwarfs are so common - there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way - this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone.""

The Stages of collapse of a star, neutron star formation and black hole formation.

A brief video on the sizes of the planets to scale and several known stars

"Astronomers have spied a star's swan song as it is shredded by a black hole. Researchers suspect that the star wandered too close to the black hole and got sucked in by the huge gravitational forces. The star's final moments sent a flash of radiation hurtling towards Earth. "

The lifecycle of a G-type star, like the Sun. All original videos are copyrighted to NASA, NASA JPL/Caltech, and ESA.

"ESA's Planck mission has delivered its first all-sky image. It not only provides new insight into the way stars and galaxies form but also tells us how the Universe itself came to life after the Big Bang."

"A team of planet hunters led by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of an Earth-sized planet (three times the mass of Earth) orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star's "habitable zone," where liquid water could exist on the planet's surface. If confirmed, this would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one."

The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.

Curious about planets on other stars?

"Most massive galaxies, including our own Milky Way, are thought to harbour supermassive black holes at their centres. But these newly discovered black holes are much bigger than would be predicted by extrapolating from observations from their host galaxies. This suggests that the factors influencing the growth of the largest galaxies and their black holes differ from those influencing smaller galaxies. The findings come from observations of two nearby galaxies: NGC 3842 and NGC 4889."

Newly discovered Alcor B orbits its larger sibling and was caught in the act with an innovative technique called "common parallactic motion" by members of Project 1640, an international collaborative team that includes astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History, the University of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, the California Institute of Technology, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Could The Force be with you? A toy due in stores this fall will let you test and hone your Jedi-like abilities.