So I live in a pretty heavily forested area which partially bleeds into the city.
It's a pretty nice area to live in honestly, and very atypical for the Netherlands (which is where I'm from): it has hills.
For people in countries that aren't a minecraft flat world: for us, 100m height difference is quite a bit. When I moved in, I often thought "why is that house so weirdly tall ??? oh wait it's on a hill"
Anyway, that's a tangent, I'm not here to talk about hills (though I should perhaps do that sometime?), I'm here to talk about the forest bit.
Forests come with a variety of wild animals, most of which I'd never seen before when I moved in (I'm from a very urban part of the country). Deer, foxes, various mustelids, etc. Not really any dangerous animals, aside from feral hogs (30-50) and apparently a few wolves, though those don't like getting close to humans.
Really, hogs are probably the biggest danger out there. I've met a few, and in most cases, turning around and walking away solves the problem.
After a few years of living here I'm quite used to having to pay attention at night, and I know in which parts to take extra care because it's a popular hangout spot for animals. Picture related, it's a deer I spotted last night.
Out here in the Nether Regions, as I affectionately like to call it, it's pretty densely populated and as a result, light pollution is pretty much everywhere. Or so I thought.
It turns out that with a ~15 minute car drive from the city, you can reach places in the woods where there's no light to be seen anywhere. Not even on the horizon, absolute pitch black. Especially at ungodly times like 3am when I'm most active, there's no oncoming traffic to instantly ruin your nightvision eyesight.
So you wait for a bit to get used to the dark, then get out, and look up.
....oh. there's stars. holy shit there are so many stars. oh damn they are so bright. oh hey, shooting stars
And then you notice that the stars actually provide enough light to see things in the environment. (along with some atmospheric scattering, okay). After a bit of sitting in the dark I noticed you could see the Milky Way with the naked eye; something I'd previously expected only to be possible way out on sea or in countries with little to no light pollution. Nope, 15 mins from home is enough.
The photo I've attached was made with a regular DSLR camera, a standard lens for allround photograpy (don't remember the numbers, sorry), a tripod and a 10 second exposure time. That's all it took to get the Andromeda galaxy clearly visible in the photo. It's that yellow dot in the upper left with an oblong dust cloud surrounding it.
I really hope anyone living in an area with light pollution can get the chance to see it without, sometime. It's really cool to see, even if it's just for a few minutes. If it weren't -6°C outside (that's roughly 20°F) I would've stayed longer. I'm very tolerant to cold, but standing still in a windy forest is a good way to become an ice cream cone.
I realize this is definitely a bit "unusual" for a post tagged slice of life, but it's just what I do. Most of the time you just see nothing, or maybe you see a pair of glowing eyes staring at you from the side of the road, or in extremely rare cases you're the first to arrive to a road accident scene at 1am (story for later!)
Most of the time it's overcast or really foggy and you won't see a thing. In summer, it never actually gets completely dark at night (though still really dark, we're not that far north), and you won't see as many stars. But sometimes, things line up and you get to see cool things :)
