Well, here we are finally - July, and this is when the noctilucent cloud season usually revvs up and we see the best displays of the year.

Since the season began at the end of May there have been around a dozen displays visible from Cumbria and across the UK, all worth seeing, but none of them have been very dramatic or spectacular.

Hopefully that will change soon, and we'll see some of the amazing displays of NLC that fill the northern sky with streamers, plumes and whirls of electric blue. Keep your eyes on the northern sky around midnight - and cross your fingers.

If it's planets you're wanting to see you'll have to get up very early, because they're all having a get-together in the pre-dawn sky.

If you get up around 3.30am (stop laughing!) and head to somewhere with a low, flat eastern horizon you'll see Venus shining very low in the sky to the NE, with Jupiter over to its right and Saturn over to Jupiter's right.

Dotted between them are Mars, Uranus and Neptune too, but the sky is so bright at that time of the morning that they're hard to see without binoculars.

If you are lucky enough to live somewhere without much light pollution, you will also be able to see the faint misty band of the Milky Way stretching across the sky, but only if you go out at the darkest time of the night, around 1am.

It will be more obvious next month, when properly dark skies begin to return.