A selection of photos from the Your Best Shot 2013 group pool. To view more photos or share your own best shot, check out Your Best Shot 2013.

Photos from Xavier J. Peg, DonStevie, Kaila Moore, pretzschy and Altug Karakoc.

The Geminid Meteor Shower, a celestial display caused by the Earth passing through debris from an asteroid, and Comet Lovejoy made fantastic appearances in the night sky this year, and many stargazers captured them with their exceptional astrophotography.

See, and share, more astrophotography in the Geminids and Comet Lovejoy gallery and Astronomy group.

Photos from amewzing, Dr. D, Thomas Heaton, slworking2, K.K.1048, Hiro.Sato, hayama3104, and Timelesslee1.

We’re proud to welcome the British Library to The Commons. The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the world’s greatest libraries. It holds over 13 million books, 920,000 journal and newspaper titles, 57 million patents, 3 million sound recordings, and much, much more.

The British Library’s collections offers access to millions of public domain images, which the Library encourages you to explore and re-use. The release of these collections into the public domain represent the Library’s desire to improve knowledge of and about them, to enable novel and unexpected ways of using them, and to begin working with researchers to explore and interpret large scale digital collections.

The first set Highlights from the Mechanical Curator comes from a British Library Labs project dubbed the Mechanical Curator, which located more than a million images from within the Library’s digitised collection of over 65,000 books from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The images are a random selection that is meant to help you start discovering this amazing collection and help the British Library improve their knowledge of the images.

The images currently have very little metadata associated with them (though they do link back to the original digitised books), and we want to invite you to discover the content in the library’s photostream and add your knowledge to it by commenting and adding meaningful tags to the images to help develop the more than 1 million photos currently available on Flickr. The library will be leveraging our Flickr API in order to build crowdsourcing activities to improve the image descriptions over time and gain a greater understanding of what resides within.

Photos from the British Library.

By Adam Mathes, Director of Product Management, Mobile Weather

Over the past year, Yahoo Weather created an experience that made checking the weather beautiful and emotional.

Today we are excited to take that award-winning experience further with the release of Yahoo Weather for iPad.

We’ve created a spectacular new design that takes advantage of the larger screen. You’ll immediately see a smart summary of weather data along with curated photography. As you scroll, forecasts, graphs and weather data delightfully animate with every interaction. Watch as raindrops fall, clouds move in, and the sun rises.

We’ve also included a new sharing feature that lets you connect with friends and family by sending the weather conditions and photo for any location via text, email, Twitter or Facebook.

The app’s images are submitted by the Flickr community, and we look forward to seeing more of your weather photos. You can submit your own photos to our Flickr group, Project Weather.

Most of us freak out at the mere sight of a bug — let alone a photo! But there’s something about biologist Sam Droege’s pictures of insects that has hundreds of thousands of people marveling at them. Sam’s photostream offers viewers a detailed and rare look at bees; comparing these little, hairy creatures to mesmerizing works of art.

Sam Droege is the head of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Bee Inventory and Monitoring Laboratory in Maryland and for the past seven years he’s been photographing bees and other insects. The purpose is to create online reference catalogs to help researchers identify the thousands of bee species across North America.

“We have to take a lot of pictures because many of these species vary only by very subtle characteristics,” Sam explains. “For some it might be the tiny pits on the surface of the top of the bee, and others it might be the pits within the pits. It’s important to take as many pictures as possible allowing our specialists to look at anything they might be interested in.”

For years, Sam and his team took pictures using simple point-and-shoot cameras. The level of detail, however, was extremely limiting.

“We were taking pictures of bees through microscopes,” Sam says. “We literally attached cameras to microscopes, often with plumbing fixtures. But in the end, we were disappointed with the number of pixels and the amount of resolution of the photos. After a while, we largely stopped pictures through microscopes because the quality wasn’t up to our standards.”

But all that changed in 2010 when Sam’s team was approached by the U.S. Army. They had developed techniques using macro photography to take photos of insect infestations from foreign bases (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.). Macro photography allowed the army to get high-quality pictures that, in turn, helped them to identify these insects and treat those affected. When Sam first saw these photos, the level of detail blew his mind.

“The army’s novelty here was the portraiture,” Sam admits. “It was the solid, black background, the off-centeredness, the flash, just everything helped provide a portrait of a bee, rather than a documentation of a bee.”

It was from that point onwards, Sam and his team adopted and modified this technique and resumed photographing their specimens.

To capture the bees with such detail, Sam and his team take several different shots of the (already dead) insect and combine them together to form one image using a special software. This software creates detailed macro images which can be blown up to five feet by eight feet without pixelating.

“When we started looking at these pictures, I just wanted to gaze at these shots for long periods of time,” Sam says. “I had seen these insects for many years, but the level of detail was incredible. The fact that everything was focused, the beauty and the arrangement of the insects themselves — the ratios of the eyes, the golden means, the french curves of the body, and the colors that would slide very naturally from one shade to another were just beautiful! It was the kind of thing that we could not achieve at the highest level of art.”

Sam began to show these pictures to several colleagues who also found them visually appealing. They encouraged him to share the photos on Flickr, as a means to transfer these images to other scientists and researchers.

“At some point we found out that someone had posted the Flickr pictures onto Reddit, and it got a huge number of views,” Sam says. “I think it was 200,000 views in two days. I couldn’t believe it! It was at that point we realized that there is interest in these kinds of pictures outside of our scientific circles, and that people just like looking at them.”

Sam says he’s always tried to attract people to what he does but admits it’s been difficult because many us have a preconceived notion that bugs are bad or gross. With these pictures, all of a sudden people were attracted to these insects because of their beauty. People described the bees as “fluffy” with “stained-glass wings.” It’s an entirely new way of reaching people Sam never thought was possible.

“I feel honored as a public servant to bring these pictures to people,” Sam admits. “They’re all public for anyone to see. And the fact that it’s not just important scientifically, but also beautiful… it makes me feel good. It reaches my soft side of my hard-scientist body. And I smile every day when I look at the number of views we’re getting on Flickr.”

Visit Sam’s photostream to see more of his photography.

Previous episode: Beautiful worlds hidden in tiny drops

Do you want to be featured on The Weekly Flickr? We are looking for your photos that amaze, excite, delight and inspire. Share them with us in the The Weekly Flickr Group, or tweet us at @TheWeeklyFlickr.

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Our last Flickr Friday theme was #Noodles. This is a selection of our favorites from your submissions.

This time it was tough trying not to get hungry after enjoying all your tasty submissions. You gave us a try from different perspectives about how you see noodles in your world. From spaghetti shining like the sun to a cold night sharing your artwork moments with friends. We also found Harry Potter and a brave noodle jump. Feel free to enjoy and share more of this fun adventure in the Flickr Friday group pool.

We appreciate the galleries of favorites that you’ve been sharing with us. You can check them all out and share yours too.

Our new theme will make you remember and cherish your old memories. If you always wanted to experience how does #TimeTravel feels, this is the opportunity for you to go with the speed of light. Maybe you will look over your old grandma’s stuff or return to that place that still keeps the vintage smell in it. You can share your shots with us in the Flickr Friday group. The selection of the week, will be showcased right here on the Flickr blog. And don’t forget to reteweet us, or share our status so you can invite your friends to take part in the challenge.

Photos from mswickedmonton, Joe Comer, Laurent VALENCIA, Ninon, Rebecca Laflam, Louise Milburn, David Wells, Derek Hall, Joanne Parker, Tobwie, Caroline PAULUS, Steve, Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps, Conny Schubert, and Bryan S.

#FlickrFriday is a weekly photography project that challenges your creativity. For a chance to be featured on FlickrBlog, follow @flickr on Twitter & like us on Facebook and look for the weekly theme announcement every Friday. Browse the Flickr Friday category for more.

A selection of analogue photos from the Your Best Shot 2013 group pool inspired by the gallery Your Best Shot 2013 – Analogue, curated by Khánh Hmoong.

To view more photos or share your own best shot, check out Your Best Shot 2013.

Photos from Ginger.Baker, StylelaB, t_araman, Thomas Struett, Rendy Nur Rizal, Jason_Combs, and Rajendrabiswas.

For the first year ever, help us celebrate the holidays by joining Flickr’s ultimate photo contest, #Flickr12Days, and sharing what joy means to you. Share your photos with us and you could win up to $5,000*!

It’s easy to join. Capture your favorite moments this holiday and visit #Flickr12Days to see what joy means to the Flickr community around the world!

Every photo is a chance to win with twelve days and twelve joyous winners! Check out #Flickr12Days to enter.

(US$ 5,000 ≈ CA: $5,220; UK: £3,100; IN: 313,650 INR; FR, DE, ES: 3,700 €; MX: $64,669)

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Architecture is one of the most important parts of a city landscape. Beauty, colors, patterns, and shapes gave us a delightful time. Get a full view of your astounding work for #TwitterTuesday.

We want to thank you for all your contributions. From all around the world you shared your shots with us – this was great to see! Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter to get the next challenge delivered directly to your feed.

Photos from Isabelle Engler, Bill Dickinson, Artur Luiz, Stéphane LAGARDE, Massis, Paula Fisher, Éole Wind, a n a n d h a m, Hernán Castro, Maciek Lulko, cbrutel, -Harm-, allophile, Laurarama, and Ephraim Muller.

A selection of insect macros from the Your Best Shot 2013 group pool. To view more photos or share your own best shot, check out Your Best Shot 2013.

Photos from jcarlos.abad, sk_husky, j man., Cx RexX, and BeetleBrained.