THE 2017 Noctilucent Cloud season is effectively over now, although there's always a chance a very late show might creep up on us, writes STUART ATKINSON. Again it as been very frustrating and disappointing; there were less than half a dozen good displays of these beautiful electric blue clouds occurring after midnight, and the Cumbrian weather stopped us seeing those, while other parts of the UK enjoyed them in all their glory. Fingers crossed next year is better - I've said that the past three years running though.

You should be keeping an eye open for shooting stars on clear nights now as we approach the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower. This is most active on the night of August 12, so I'll give you more information about it in the next Skywatch, but we should start to see the number of shooting stars zipping across the sky start to climb over this coming week. You'll see more after midnight, and the darker and less light-polluted a place you can get to the better.

It's now reasonably dark by midnight and the Milky Way can be seen from a dark sky location, cutting the sky in half from NE to SW like a wide, misty band, marked with bright clumps of stars in some places and darker areas in others. We'll see it much better in August and September when the sky is darker earlier.