Dates for your saved location. Each year the planet slips behind the Sun’s glare for a few weeks, then reappears in the morning sky.

Uranus is tipped completely over — its axis lies almost in the plane of its orbit, so it rolls around the Sun like a ball, each pole spending 42 years in sunlight and 42 in darkness. It is an ice giant: beneath its hydrogen and helium skies lies a deep, hot mantle of water, methane and ammonia, and methane gas gives it its pale blue-green colour.

At magnitude 5.7 Uranus sits right at the edge of naked-eye visibility — under a truly dark sky you can just glimpse it as a faint star when you know exactly where to look. In binoculars it is easy; in a telescope it shows a tiny, distinctly non-stellar blue-green disc. It moves so slowly it lingers in the same constellation for years.