A dazzling full moon lit up the UK skies last night, with incredible images showing the celestial body looming large over some of Britain's most famous landmarks.
The so-called Sturgeon Moon was spotted overnight on Monday and remained visible into the early hours of Tuesday morning across the country.
Skyward-gazing Brits were quick to photograph the phenomenon, with one stunning snap from London showing the moon hovering behind The Shard, Britain's tallest building.
The Sturgeon Moon - so-named by Native Americans after the great number of the huge freshwater fish that could once be found in lakes and rivers in North America at this time of year - was also sighted floating above Stonehenge in Wiltshire, and hovering behind houses in Poole, Dorset.
Other spectacular photographs showed the celstial body hovering in the night sky above the United States, Colombia and Greece, among other places.
The August full moon has also commonly been called the green corn moon, the grain moon, and the red moon for the reddish hue it often takes on in the summer haze.
As the moon orbits Earth, it typically goes through 12 lunar cycles made up of eight distinct phases each year.
The full, quarter and new Moons are all the instants in time when the Moon is exactly fully, half or not at all illuminated from our perspective on Earth.
According to the Royal Observatory, in Greenwich, "many of the Moon’s nicknames have come to us from Native American culture because for their way of life, the cycles of the lunar phases were just as important a method of timekeeping as the longer solar cycle of the year".
