Everyone knows that living in the city means that your view of the night sky is rubbish due to the amount of light pollution. With living in a village I thought I had a pretty decent view of the vastness above, but oh how wrong I was. As we live about a 5 minute drive outside Ballynahinch town centre there are zero street lights near us and our closest neighbour is 2 fields away. Once the sun sets we are immersed in a blanket of darkness.
I can’t put into perspective how amazing the night sky has become by moving only 20 minutes down the road. The blanket of stars spread out above is literally out of this world, if you'll pardon the pun! If there’s a meteor shower we’ll drag the sun loungers outside and lie in the middle of the yard watching them fly past. We’ve seen tons of shooting stars and we've even spotted satellites zooming overhead too.
The sunsets in this part of the world are incredible. My obsession with them has gotten to the point where I check the weather app on my phone, which tells me what time the sun is setting that day, so that I don’t miss out. I’ve left meals half eaten to get up the hill in time to catch the last of the rays, arrived home after work and headed straight up the field before going into the house, as well as leaving poor Tommy stranded mid-conversation to get outside and capture that perfect shot. It all sounds a bit mad I know, but I’ll leave these photographs with you and I hope you’ll all agree that my crazy behaviour is completely justified!