This week I’ve been obsessed with the sky. There has been a meteor shower, and last night (Wednesday 22nd April) at 11:00pm was the best time to see it. If there are two things I could look at forever it is the sea and the stars.

To think we are a speck of dust in a universe that is a part of a galaxy that is just one of trillions. It really makes me think that all the worry, sadness, pain and stress we feel is so out of our control when you put us in this context. We are such a living miracle. To think we exist on a planet that has just the right amount of everything to allow us to live and breathe freely, yet the planets surrounding us would kill us instantly. These are just a few thoughts I tend to have as I try to drift off to sleep… typical.

On Sunday night I managed to see Venus through my telescope which was amazing. Venus is the second-brightest natural object in the night sky after the moon. To think that I was looking at something not part of this earth with my bare eye is just unreal. Sunday was the best night to see Venus in my opinion as there wasn’t a cloud in sight. Here is a picture I took with my camera: 

On Monday night I spent most of my time just obsessing over the number of stars out in the sky and trying to see a shooting one. An app that I would recommend if it is something you may be interested in is the SkyView lite free app available on the AppStore. It shows you where all the planets in the sky are and all the constellations. This is a picture i took of our night sky:

One day I would love to go somewhere where the stars look like this:

I found that the more I stared at the sky the more stars seemed to appear. Only then did I start to see some shooting across the sky. I can never really get my head around how far away a star is. It is like looking into the past which is incredible. Reading about lightyears and trying to figure it all out, I came across an article which is a really good read and helped me to understand things a little bit more:

Scientists claim that if an alien 65 million light years away sees earth through a powerful telescope, they can see “dinosaurs”.

As far as I’ve read, I don’t think any star that we can see with our naked eye is that far away but it puts it in to perspective very well. What I took from this statement is that the time it takes for light to leave the star to the moment it reaches our eye is measured in light years. If a star is 60 light years away that means the light we see with our eye when we look at the star is 60 years old. Wow!

On Tuesday, I had read so much about stars and only planned on staying out for a couple of minutes just to look at them. Obviously that turned into so much longer because I just got so obsessed! Amongst them I could see small objects fly past but they were really faint and required a lot of focus to follow. I am convinced they were a low earth satellites.

Elon Musk’s has sent satellites up which actually follow each other. I spotted one flying past following the route of the one in front. I have honestly never seen anything so cool. I tried to get a picture with my camera and managed to get it moving. If you look closely you can see a faint line created by the camera from where the satellite has passed.

Wednesday night! The best night! The sky started of quite cloudy but soon cleared up. The second it did I seen two meteors fly past about 5 minutes apart and they felt so close. I can only describe them as bright white lights and so pretty. I sat out until 1:00am but it was worth every second to see them.

I don’t think I could ever be bored looking at the stars because every night is a completely different experience. You just don’t know what you’re going to see or what you might realise.

I don’t know a lot about space. Hardly anything if I’m being honest but after this week I think I’m slightly obsessed with it… I’m sure there will be plenty more posts.s