If you look at your calendar to find today's date, you can see the month, days of the week and maybe some appointments. But you're also looking at something that tracks Earth's journey around the Sun, reflects three thousand years of history and helps to hold our society together.

Flying fish live in warm oceans, and so do the mahi mahi fish. Sailors in the southern seas saw the flying fish using their side fins like wings to glide through the air – sometimes chased by hungry mahi mahi. Dorado (Mahi mahi) pursues Volans (Flying fish) in the stars of the southern sky.

Moon phases and eclipses are easily seen, but rather abstract to understand. The first section of this article lists the basic concepts with some links to diagrams. The sections that follow suggest resources for teachers, both lesson plans and short videos available online.

Eridanus is the great river that flows through the southern sky. One its stars, Epsilon Eridani, is of special interest to us because of its nearness and because the sunlike star has a planetary system. Benefiting from a new IAU naming policy, the star and its planet are now also Ran and AEgir.

Saturn has lots of moons – more than five dozen of them with confirmed orbits. They are remarkable in many ways, but perhaps the strangest one is the misshapen and unpredictable Hyperion.

Autumn begins on the equinox, the day the Sun crosses the equator. The earliest known civilizations celebrated the equinoxes, and they're still celebrated in many places. One of the biggest autumn celebrations is the Chinese Moon Festival. A traditional Chinese garden has a moon-watching pavilion.