As easy as it is to step outside at night and gaze upon the expanse of the cosmos, professional efforts to understand our place in the Universe have stalled. Ordinarily a night using the largest telescopes in the world is a precious commodity, with every cloudy night a tragic loss. Now however, these telescopes sit idle on mountains the world over, the safety of those who keep them functioning our primary concern.

Sometimes the Universe comes to us - if you've ever seen a shooting star, then you've seen an unlucky piece of cosmic dust or space rock collide with Earth's atmosphere to be heated above freezing for the first time in billions of years. Some are asteroids that got too close to Earth, others still are the disintegrated remains of comets - the dirty snowballs of space. A small fraction are from the Moon or Mars, rocks hurled into space by giant collisions in eons past. All are precious records of the history of our Solar System, and those that don't burn up in the atmosphere are often found by geologists on fieldwork, combing the deserts of places like Australia and Antarctica to find rocks that don't quite resemble those around them. 2020 has put a stop to this too.

The Universe does not stop however. Our home, the Milky Way Galaxy, not content with its hundreds of billions of stars, continues to make more, averaging about one Sun-like star per year. The 4,000 odd planets we know of, and many more undiscovered, lazily continue their orbits around distant stars. Further afield, stars continue to die - the Universe is so colossally vast that over its entire volume 50 stars per second die as supernovae explosions, scattering newly created atoms like iron throughout their galaxies.

Fortunately, we've a lot of data about the Universe already. Good scientists love to share their love of nature with anyone who'll listen or help out, and websites such as Zooniverse are a fantastic resource. Have you run out of flour, bringing your breadmaking to a startling halt? Why not help astronomers hunt for supermassive black holes or star forming galaxies with Radio Galaxy Zoo: LOFAR. Has your pet tired of being photogenic and gone to sleep? Why not see astronomy from a historical perspective and help transcribe notes from the groundbreaking work of early women astronomers from nearly 100 years ago with Star Notes. Hit your TV quota for the day, but astronomy not your jam? Apps such as iNaturalist and Frog ID let you engage in backyard biology and help researchers in figuring out what species are where in our modern world.

So the Universe goes on, and whilst some of the science has stopped, we still have many windows left to peer at the natural world in motion. So if you like science and learning, consider becoming a citizen scientist. The world can be pretty dark at times, and scientists could always use a hand lighting it up.