Daylight opens up rapidly during April and by the second half of the month, the Sun is setting after 8pm BST.

After the Sun has set, Venus continues to be very prominent in the evening sky and is joined by a 15 per cent illuminated young Moon on April 23, best seen from 9pm BST.

Venus is easily the brightest object in the night sky apart from the Moon and can cast faint shadows if the conditions to see them are just right.

Occasionally, brighter objects than Venus can occur – such as supernovae (exploding stars), but the last really bright one was in 1604, which for a few weeks could be seen in daylight.

Mars is in Gemini all this month and towards the end of April forms a triangle with the two brightest stars of the constellation, all of which will be of similar brightness.

The Lyrid meteors peak this month, with watches late on the 22nd and into the early morning of the 23rd offering the best chance of seeing these fast-moving meteors which strike the Earth’s atmosphere at 30 miles per second.

The Lyrid meteor shower is one of the oldest known. Records go back for some 2,700 years, recorded by the Chinese.

A record from 687BC describes the meteors as "falling like rain". Such a display is not expected this year but bursts of meteors do occur in some years, the last one being in 1982.

The meteors appear from a point in the sky near the constellation of Lyra, which is led by the bright star Vega, found about a third the way up the sky in the North East at midnight on the 22nd/23rd April (see map).

With the Sun now more active with many sunspot ‘active areas’, this has produced several displays of the aurora in recent weeks which were seen from southern counties of England.

The best time to look for the aurora in April will be during late evenings after the Full Moon, which is on April 6.