A SPECTACULAR view of the Northern Lights was captured on the Black Mountain on Monday night in an extremely rare display of the phenomenon.
Environmental enthusiasts Aaron Kelly and Dermot McArt were searching for owls up the mountain when they came across the technicolour spectacle.
Known as the ‘Aurora Borealis', the display is formed by a solar flare erupting on the Sun which sends charged participles towards Earth which interact with the atmosphere.
Stunning scenes were captured all across the island, illuminating the landscape of the night’s sky.
“We were on our way back from looking for owls and we didn’t think we were going to see them,” Aaron Kelly told the Andersonstown News.
Green warrior Aaron Kelly taking in the views
“The next thing they came up on Divis so that shows how strong they were last night especially with all the light pollution we have here.”
Aaron said that the mountain was full of people looking to see the natural light display.
“We kept looking at one spot and then the next thing it was really faint, but I knew straight away it was the Northern Lights.
“My friend Dermot has the night mode on his phone, and he took the pictures. He aimed the camera at it and then put his night mode on and the pictures came out.”
Ballymurphy man Aaron Kelly, is behind the Black Mountain Rewilding initiative which promotes and enhances biodiversity on the mountain. In October last year, the project was behind the creation of a wildlife pond on the mountain.
“The main thing with our project is we want to create habitat to bring new species in and increase the species that are already there and so far we’ve already brought new species in. We’ve brought a heron onto the mountain and that’s the first ever heron I’ve seen on the mountain.”
The man behind the lens, Dermot McArt
“On the pond, there are two patches of frog spawn. To have frog spawn in a fresh new pond is really unheard of so it shows that the mountain needed a pond because if they’re laying spawn that fast it shows the frogs didn’t have anywhere to lay their spawn. It’s brilliant.”
In the coming weeks, the project is set to plant another 1,500 trees to finish off the planting season and to enhance the important highways for nature to move across the hills.
