Sunset revisited

Tonight my husband called our collective attention to the sunset outside the back of our house as I was cooking supper. I urged our 13-year-old to grab the camera and take a few pictures, so the photo credit above and immediately below go to him. I love that this is normal for him; he immediately ran down to my desk to retrieve the camera and then headed out the back door. He also took the sunrise photo I posted a couple of days ago entirely without my knowing about it till I found it on the camera, so it comes pretty naturally.

Living here for more than a year now, we’ve seen our share of sunsets and sunrises, but it’s the sunsets that tend to capture more of our attention as they are so hard to miss as the living areas in our house are south-facing and we’re able to track the end of day sun as it sets in the west.

We’ve had some spectacularly colourful ones, of course.

And a few with truly astonishing bands of fire-like pigment next to inky black sky.

We’ve enjoyed soft summer skies in July.

And cool blue winter skies in January.

The moon has appeared in many different guises too, though I can never capture it to share it properly here it seems. This pale yellow moon appeared in the early hours of a July morning last year.

We camped on our patch of land before our house was ever built here, not long after the Icelandic volcanic eruptions that grounded so many planes in the spring of 2010. The moon in the wee hours of that morning was absolutely enormous and an orangeish-yellow that I’ve never seen before. No camera to hand then, of course!

For now, we have a few more winter skies ahead of us until spring (though my goodness it feels like spring here already – we just don’t have winter like we used to).

I never felt so connected to the sky and what it might be doing at any given time of the day until we moved here. I think I can say the same of all us, including our youngest, who painted this sunset last year.

The most amazing thing is that the sky and its sunsets and sunrises are the same for all of us underneath it, and yet different depending on where we are and what we see of it.