People around the world have been enjoying the fourth and final supermoon of 2022.

Known as the Sturgeon Moon, it was at its closest point to Earth at 02:36 BST on Friday.

Photographers captured the lunar event alongside stunning landscapes and famous landmarks.

The rare lunar phenomenon occurs when there is a full moon while it is also at its closest point to the Earth in its orbit. The effect is that the moon appears larger and brighter in the sky.

And on an exciting night for astronomers, shooting stars from the Perseids Meteor Shower also danced across the night sky.

Stargazers were treated to amazing views as most of the UK – apart from a few unlucky parts of northern Scotland – enjoyed clear skies.

The Supermoon reached its full brightness at 2.36am.

Incredible pictures were taken in Northumberland, London, the Isle of Wight and all across the southern coast of England.

Beautiful pictures were captured by photographers in other parts of the world too such as Jordan and Turkey.

As Europe lives through a long, hot summer, one of the continent’s major rivers is getting drier – posing major problems for the people and businesses that rely on it.

Captain Andre Kimpel casts an experienced, but worried, eye across the river Rhine, where water levels have dropped significantly in recent days.

Several ferry services in and around the town of Kaub have been forced to a standstill, but he’s still carrying people and their cars across the water to the opposite bank – for now.

“It’s no joke,” he says as he navigates the water which sparkles in the summer sunshine. “We have 1.5m [5ft] of water and our boat sits 1.20m deep. So we have 30 centimetres of water left beneath us.”

It’s not unusual for water levels to drop here but, Captain Kimpel says, it’s happening more frequently. “We used to have a lot of floods. Now we have a lot of low waters.”

On the riverbank nearby, there’s an old measuring station. Any skipper wanting to enter the Upper Rhine will refer to the official water level recorded here.

Swiss army helicopters have been drafted in to airlift water to thousands of thirsty farm animals sweltering under this summer’s soaring temperatures in the country’s Alpine meadows.

Lower rainfall this year forced farmers to call on the army to swoop in with much-needed refreshments for their animals and prevent a drought causing feed shortages later in the year.

A two-week operation is now under way with Super Puma helicopters flying to refill the near-empty reservoirs used by farmers for their cows, whose milk is often used to make Gruyere cheese, and other animals such as pigs and goats.

Without the emergency water supply, the animals would have to be brought down from their elevated fields to graze in lowlands, where normally their winter hay is produced during the summer months.

Swiss territorial army commander Mathias Tuescher said six helicopters had been mobilised for the effort, which will run until Aug. 19.

Overall some 400,000 tonnes of water could be dropped by the helicopters into the reservoirs, he said, with 1.5 tonnes delivered each trip.

The operation was also carried during the droughts of 2015 and 2018.

Poland has deployed soldiers to help clean up the Oder River, which runs along the border with Germany, after 10 tons of dead fish surfaced from the waterway in what one official described as an “ecological catastrophe.”

An association of fishers in Zielona Gora, a city in Western Poland, said Friday that it was suspending fishing in the river due to still-unconfirmed reports in the German media saying the river could be contaminated with mercury.

Investigations are underway to determine the cause of the mass die-off of fish. Huge numbers of dead fish were first spotted near the southwestern Polish town of Olawa in late July, along with animals such as beavers.

“We are most likely dealing with a crime where a substance was introduced into the water that causes the death of fish and other organisms. This is currently being verified,” Jacek Ozdoba, Poland’s deputy climate and environment minister, said.

Poland’s political opposition and local residents have accused the government of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of being too slow to confront the problem.

Przemyslaw Daca, the head of Polish Waters, the national water management authority, said Thursday that 10 tons of dead fish already were removed from the river.

“This shows that we are dealing with a gigantic and outrageous ecological catastrophe,” he said at a news conference held near the river, where officials faced angry local residents.

Environmental protection authorities in the southwestern city of Wroclaw had earlier notified local prosecutors that the country’s second-longest river appeared to have been poisoned.

Defense Minister Mariusz Błaszczak announced Thursday that both regular soldiers and reservists were being deployed to help remove pollutants from the river, which is known as the Oder in German and the Odra in Polish and Czech. It flows northward for hundreds of miles from the Oder Mountains of Czechia and empties in the Baltic Sea.

German officials have complained that Poland failed to honor an international treaty by not notifying them immediately about the possible contamination of the river. A boat captain first alerted German authorities about the dead fish in the river on Aug. 9.

“We know that the chain of reporting that’s envisaged for such cases didn’t work,” Christopher Stolzenberg, a spokesperson for Germany’s Federal Environment Ministry, said.

“We finally got the message yesterday that should have come from the Polish side,” he told reporters in Berlin. “But in fact, the pollution on the German side was already known about by then.”

Stolzenberg said German authorities were in contact with their Polish counterparts to get further information about the situation, including about substances found in the water, and to provide any assistance requested.

The Knud Rasmussen’s Museum is a small museum that is dedicated to the famous Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen, and it is located in the central part of the town of Ilulissat, formerly known as Jacobshaven, in the Avannaata Municipality, in western part of the autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, Greenland.

Being a small, quite charming red house, the museum is the birthplace of the local legend that established a network of trading posts here and played an important role in the exploration and development of the Inuit people, whom he considered as his own people.

Sometimes Rasmussen is referred to as “the Father of Eskimology”, and perhaps one of his greatest accomplishments was being the first man ever to cross with his dog team the sea route to the Pacific Ocean through the Arctic Ocean, alongside the northern coast of North America, better known as the Northwest Passage.

Sadly, Knud Rasmussen died on 21 December 1933 at the age of 54 after contracting food poisoning from a Greenlandic delicacy, pickled auks, which were not actually pickled in vinegar, and instead they were somewhat semi-rotten.

Nevertheless, his legacy nowadays continues, as his birthplace is converted into a museum that is centered on three permanent exhibitions: the town and village, the history of Knud Rasmussen and his Arctic expeditions, and Sermermiut – the big settlement by the Icefjord.

The exterior of the museum is easy to recognize, as it is with two floors, bright red color and white borderlines.

The entrance is forward and connected with staircase which is accessible from two sides.

Surrounded by other houses and residential building, it is also overlooking the striking Zion’s Church which too is an historic object in the small town.

Even though it is very small, all in all, the Knud Rasmussen’s Museum is definitely something that everyone should visit whenever in Ilulissat, simply because there is quite a lot to be learned about the Inuit people and the expeditions to which this Greenlandic-Danish explorer has dedicated his life.