Just some pretty - or unusual - pictures ...

There was no true "Breaking News" event this week, but some pretty amazing celestial pictures taken by amateur astronomers have been published in recent days, worth a post after all:

• A lunar mosaic with 56 Megapixels has been assembled from firewire webcam movies at a C14.
  
  
• The rising Full Moon has been caught; the - still poorly explained - Moon illusion kicks in in these situations.
  
  
• And an amazing sunset sequence with lots of atmospheric optics has been obtained, with a perfect Omega distortion (aka "Etruscan Vase effect") and a clear Green Flash.

Incidentally a fine Omega effect had been seen during a partially eclipsed Sunrise in 2006, also yours truly - an inferior mirage in action. (Later I also found out where this appearance of the Sun had first been compared to an Etruscan vase: It was in Jules Verne's novel Le Rayon Vert, during the final "showdown" - on page 287 of this German translation.) Atmospheric optics is cool - but beware of faulty interpretations ...

In other news it has been determined that a recently discovered comet was very close to Jupiter in 2005, while another one came too close to the Sun on June 16. • More image processing of the June 14 Jupiter shown in the last post and another one from June 19. • And this blog has learned about an unsuccessful attempt to catch the Venus occultation by the Sun in Tasmania; here is a digital version of the newspaper article announcing the plan.