The following is a timeline of Solar System astronomy and science. It includes the advances in the knowledge of the Earth at planetary scale, as part of it.

Direct observation

Humans (Homo sapiens) have inhabited the Earth in the last 300,000 years at least, and they had witnessed directly observable astronomical and geological phenomena. For millennia, these have arose admiration and curiosity, being admitted as of superhuman nature and scale. Multiple imaginative interpretations were being fixed in oral traditions of difficult dating, and incorporated into a variety of belief systems, as animism, shamanism, mythology, religion and/or philosophy. Although such phenomena are not "discoveries" per se, as they are part of the common human experience, their observation shape the knowledge and comprehension of the world around us, and about its position in the observable universe, in which the Sun plays a role of outmost importance for us. What today is known to be the Solar System was regarded for generations as the contents of the "whole universe". The most relevant phenomena of these kind are: Along with an indeterminate number of unregistered sightings of rare events: meteor impacts; novae and supernovae.

Antiquity

Middle Ages

16th century

17th century

18th century

19th century

1900–1957

1958–1976

1977–2000

2001–present