The year 2023 provided a lot of exciting astronomy. It wasn't easy to choose the most interesting, but here are the ones that I liked best.

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.

Saturn's vivid rings are well known, but it's not the only ringed planet. And it isn't just planets that have rings. The cosmos has a variety of ringed objects.

Since the name of Nicolaus Copernicus is still well known nearly five hundred years after his death, why was his grave unmarked until 2010? Find out about the life of the quiet revolutionary that turned our view of the universe inside out.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has protocols for the naming of heavenly bodies. In the past, there were traditional names, names given by discoverers, and all sorts of other names. Moons were a novelty, and they were a long time in getting names. How many of these stories do you know?

Rosetta went where no space mission had been before! It caught up with a comet in deep space and went into orbit around it. Its lander Philae was the first ever to land on a comet. At the end of the mission, Rosetta also landed on the comet to join it and Philae on the comet's journey.

Christmas 2022 is past, but the daily "astro advent" images in the Astronomy Forum are still there to enjoy. The second eight days included both a magnificent aurora and an awesome meteor shower.

Pluto was the baby of the Solar System planets. Although only slightly bigger than Russia, Pluto is the biggest known dwarf planet. It has five moons, and that's more than there are in the inner Solar System. Earth has one moon, Mars has two, and Mercury and Venus have none.

Christmas 2022 is past, but the daily "astro advent" images in the Astronomy Forum are still there to enjoy. The final eight days – plus a Christmas bonus – included a fire rainbow, ice halos and a spectacular comet.

Saturday is Saturn's day. Saturn, a god of ancient mythology, is the planet with the beautiful rings. For 13 years, the Cassini space mission studied Saturn, its rings and moons. We now know of 145 moons of Saturn.