Well, the weather has been so dreadful over the past week or so that glimpses of anything "up there" over the festive period were few and far between.

But if you do manage to find yourself under a rare tear in the clouds this coming week, what can you see in the night sky?

The most obvious thing is the planet Venus, which is currently a brilliant and beautiful "Evening Star". You'll first see Venus shining about a quarter of the way up in the sky above the south-western horizon around half an hour after sunset, looking like a metallic silvery blue spark of light. As darkness deepens Venus just gets brighter and brighter until, by half past five, it simply dominates that part of the sky. As long as there are no buildings in the way you can see Venus even from the middle of a light-polluted town right now, it's so bright, but if you can get somewhere away from streetlights it will be a stunning sight, like a lantern hanging in the sky.

When you're out looking at Venus you might see a trail of a dozen or more lights moving silently across the sky, from west to east. These aren't UFOs, as some newspapers are saying - they're "Starlink" satellites and there are now hundreds of them orbiting the Earth in "wagon trains".

They might look fascinating, but astronomers are concerned that soon there will be so many of these crossing the sky that they will ruin observations and change the appearance of the constellations too. So, enjoy any clear night we get, because soon there might be more satellites than stars visible, which would be a great shame.